soCurio | art is for everyone

My work emerges from the interplay between my subject and myself. I am the director; I assemble the pieces and build the world. She does more than play a role; she reveals a reality. The world of the paintings is enclosed, female, and wet. Water supports and unbalances, frees and drowns, reveals and obscures. In the flow of the unconscious, things sink and rise from the depths; thoughts eddy and swirl. She is both loosened and enclosed by this watery element. She has become a seawitch, a mermaid, a monster. Rich in substances, she is made from the material which surrounds and ensnares her – water, weeds, roots, hair, pearls, snails and drowned petals. She revolves in a trance; she ebbs, she flows. She doesn't speak in words. She is her own society, her own species. She is languid but wily. She spawns, she excretes. The snails are her familiars. They are our familiars. They are hard, spiraling vessels for secrets, slime, and unformed thought. They trace shining trails over her body and through the pictures. They leave evidence. They suggest. The world of the paintings — of ponds, of tubs, of empty shells and the spaces between things —is the world of the self. There is a permeable membrane between my self and hers, between this created but tangible world and ours. Things flow in, things flow out. Through alignment and pressure, the overlap of contours, the eschewal of boundaries, we trick solipsism. All that can be known is the self, but together we expand the self infinitely.