Artist Statement

Art making is a process of finding a meaningful, integrated balance between idea and its physical manifestation. This series of works, Rupture, is about the tension between dualities: facade/truth, construction/destruction, beauty/ugliness, death/renewal, flatness/dimensionality. These pieces began with frustration and despair at the state of our society, with the ugly underbelly that has become fully exposed in recent years. Seeking catharsis, I took an older series of paintings, Seven Sorrows, and smashed into the panels with hammers and weights. Working from the back side of the panels, I pressed encaustic through to the other side, where it oozed onto newly painted imagery referential of natural elements: water, fire, earth, body, plant life. I think of these paintings as wounded, metaphors for our times, both personal and social. The ambiguous nature of the images begs the question, whether these are images of death and destruction, or growth and rebirth?