Artist’s Statement

I feed on the stored cultural baggage of intimate domestic space – and research historical ceramics, textiles, and heraldry.  Processed by an imagination raised on Disney and coloring books -- this physical stuff of the world encourages me to play my own language games.  Educated at a time when historical decorative arts traditions were a zone forbidden by late modernism and my “rigorous” faculty,

I now happily indulge in a sense that the borders between ceramic decoration or textile design -- and painting -- are completely permeable membranes.

Through studying and making ceramic work, faience in Quimper, talavera in Dolores Hidalgo, and maiolica in Deruta, I have had close encounters with artisans from centuries past and their current counterparts.  Their exceptional brushwork and iconographic invention inspires a “refictionalizing” in my paintings.  I want to converse with codes of taste, the shorthand developed to describe nature, and the idyllic and pastoral slamming against repossessed abstracted power icons.  In “Strapaese” – the heraldic wild boar at right meets the “moderne” of formica design at left --- with ghosts of organic abstraction strewn between.   In “The Hunt in the Kitchen” I mimic tile work that might surround a sink - where while a potato is peeled - a deer is torn to shreds by dogs.  I look to give myself as much permission to raid the attic of the past as I can find.  Our stories are told, coded and repeated on objects humble or luxurious - personal and public.  Recombinatory strategies feel like magic to me and the dependable vibration of figure/ground never bores me.  I want the paintings to exude humor for the present, respect for the past and most of all to tweak curiosity.