My work usually begins with curiosity and then gets a little obsessive. I’m drawn to surfaces that make me want to get too close: wet, cracked, shimmering, corroded, soft, sharp, beautiful, slightly disgusting. I want the work to have that same pull on the viewer. Ideally, there’s a moment when looking isn’t quite enough and you start wondering what it would feel like to touch.

Nature is constantly sneaking into the work, although rarely in a polite way. I’m interested in the strange intelligence of things that grow, spread, erode, rot, bloom, molt, shimmer, and reclaim territory. Water moving over rocks. Glistening shells. Slime. Tangled roots. Iridescent insects and strange sea creatures. Sometimes the surfaces feel geological, sometimes biological, sometimes like evidence of a place that doesn’t exist.

But beauty in my work is rarely innocent.

I’m increasingly interested in what happens when something seductive is interrupted by something unsettling. A beautiful surface cracks open. Gold peels away. Flowers push through decay. A white flag becomes shredded and useless. A childlike object finds itself suspended over destruction. Something that initially seems playful can become ominous once you spend a little time with it.

That tension feels increasingly connected to the world around me. Politics, war, violence, environmental anxiety, spectacle, and the general absurdity of being alive right now inevitably find their way into the studio. I don’t necessarily begin with the intention of making political work. Sometimes the world just barges in.

Material is how I think through all of this. Paint alone rarely feels sufficient. I build, bury, tear, layer, attach, corrode, illuminate, obscure, and occasionally destroy things until the work begins to have a physical presence of its own. The resulting pieces exist somewhere between painting, sculpture, assemblage, and theatrical set.

I like not knowing exactly what they are.

They might be fragments of landscape, remnants of some disaster, strange organisms, little monuments, or artifacts recovered from a world very much like ours.

Just slightly stranger.