My Visual Language

My visual language emphasizes the representation of only what needs to be present to trigger the imagination. I think of my process as visual storytelling- a vernacular language of unexpected collisions, images displaced from their usual contexts, distilled, condensed and primary. Like poetry it invites intimacy - images draw you in, you playfully consider them and then something far from innocent takes hold of you.

This project is written and read through the eyes, seeming contradictions used to form narratives that lead to association, not linear, without a single meaning to contain them. Everything suggests something familiar, but invites a reading that leads to multiple interpretations - a web or constellation of associations, that shifts as the viewer moves from image to image.

There are a number of references utilized: to nature, the interiors of houses, boats, water, deer, men and women, full moons, lighthouses and images drawn from the art of Renaissance, Oceanic art as well as European and American sources. The images I use are all characters to me, actors in an episodic drama that keeps unfolding. They can be read literally or they can lead to metaphor - something is always suggesting something else, evoking shifting states of calm, tension, searching, isolation and union. The natural world is represented as both alluring promise and suggests a potential for loss or danger. This ambiguity - I see it as a mythic state of elemental forces that re-play themselves in multiple forms and guises. I seek to represent and evoke psychological moments by using the familiar, drawing the viewer into the images, for prolonged examination. Quiet places of refuge, seductive, yet fraught with their own complexities. Whether landscape or seascape, the only constant is movement and a longing for protection and the fear of being held captive in what we have created or what has been created for us.

My work is a personal view, put together to cast a glance at human nature, to blur the distinction, between what is imagined and what is literally true. I don't believe we are the sum total of objective descriptions - we assemble ourselves by searching through our subjective experience and constantly re-assembling - our understanding is constantly altered by wandering and searching. My work is about speculative, poetic observations rather than concrete analytic constructions, to assemble a series of continuing commentaries in constant motion.

The Expulsion is a series of images, filled with metaphors about how nature and human nature interact. We can be in quiet spaces and our thoughts over flow, we constantly imagine a time or place before the present or a time or place in the future. We create pictures, poetry, and conversation - constant waves of memory, words and actions that we live in and that live through us.

A central visual theme in this series is based on figures derived from Masaccio's the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden which are re-presented to evoke a sense of displacement from some ideal world and our struggle to construct a world in which to live. We live in a world that is both a paradise and touched with threat. I am using images that are at first familiar, yet estranged from the commonplace, presented as a whole, setting the stage for psychological readings: intimacy, vulnerability, isolation, sensuality, danger, complacence - a complex geography of mind and world.

My work suggests the battle, between secure singular destinations and the way life seduces us into the unexpected and previously unconsidered. The need to control for seeming security and how we are held captive by the consequences of this control. What is beautiful and disturbing about images is that they lead to multiple interpretations. They are elusive and consequential. They have the capacity to draw us to them, trigger spontaneity, and to lead us to question what has become fixed and rigid - to seduce us into seeing and searching.