I am juggling three different processes at the moment; collage, watercolor drawings, and cut-wood pieces that I call my “Wall Drawings.” With all I like to play around with silhouetting, patterning, geometric design qualities and symmetry. The recognizable characters of my current work often include insects, flowers, and birds, and the designs also play with negative space as an emotive quality. You may assume when looking at my work that entomology, ornithology, and botany are of interest to me, because I appropriate a lot of that arrangement style in my compositions. This is true. However, in full disclosure, I mostly consider the collective outcome of these studies and the corresponding physical collection or presentation without much curiosity towards any scientific findings.  

What I am mostly interested in is what do scientific collections communicate regarding the nature of “the collector” and the evolving identity of a subject? Rather than paying much attention to the subjects themselves as research, I am intrigued by how the individual who was studying them gathers, sorts, and presents their visual research to an audience.  And also how the identity of the subjects seem to change when they are removed from their natural environment and placed into sterile environments devoid of the clutter of habitat. The storytelling nature of this reconstruction of meaning is intriguing to me.  I am excited to explore more of these ideas during my residency at the Bush Barn Annex.  Feel free to pop by to visit and chat any time I am working.  

Bio: I was born in 1979 in the midwest, in central Wisconsin, and then moved to Arizona for my middle and high school years.  I relocated to Oregon for college and have mostly lived there since.  Currently (and forever, I hope) I live on a seed farm just south of Salem, Oregon, and I teach art at a local public high school in addition to being a visual artist.