Wonderland’s Clover & Other Ground Cover

Wonderland’s Clover & Other Ground Cover (2012-2018) is my first series of works that felt as if my voice was coming through.  As an artist, sometimes you get to have these magical experiences where you discover a conversation that you want to have with your work, one where your practice becomes more about facilitating a type of creative play from one piece to the next.  Eventually, that “play” becomes more about yourself and how you exist in the world.  Then, somehow an unknown third party that can only be channeled becomes the facilitator and you become the disjointed words and phrases that make up the most interesting parts of the conversation.

This series is a conversation about how to visualize a soul.  When I was in my early 20’s I often wondered what your soul would look like if separated from the human body and I imagined it would be something creature-esk that is found in nature.  This curiosity took me down a path to personal narrative and storytelling that evolved into surrealist landscapes and installations.  

I choose to continue to show this work because it lays an important foundation for how I engage with my art today, as well as how I would like it to engage with me in return.

Today, I still see myself and my work as a symbiotic blend of each other.  I’ve learned that there is a certain amount of personal vulnerability that I need to have for my art to continue to grow.  For that reason, the work that I did 10 years ago is still relevant today.  I think it’s unfortunate that the art world teaches artists to disvalue their older works as if time creates some type of creative hierarchy.  For this I ask, what is the point of making anything if, as artists, we do now allow our creations to live their full lifetime after we have finished making them?  And who are we to decide when those creations are no longer relevant?