Art and Art History

Artist Statement

“The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

-Romans 8:19-22

In this body of work I examine the collaboration between idea and process, and the dialogue between faith–the driving force of my work—and the viewer’s perception. The statements of St. Paul in his letter to the Romans engaged my imagination in creating this body of work, which explores through form, color, and process the bondage of nature to decay. To initiate this process I developed a vocabulary of form, which I found in leaf venation patterns. The form becomes a symbol that the eye can understand: through seeing its materiality, it can discover its meaning.

The two-dimensional spaces created by these forms are the result of the careful application of ink, and the response of water to the movement of my hand or the static horizontal position of the paper. The darker fluid lines appear as the paper absorbs the water and the ink layers. Water responds to gravity, creating either horizontal puddles inside the forms or straight lines on the wall drawing; these lines create a tension with the contrasting, curvilinear forms.

The layering of ink and its transformation on paper is organic: it is reminiscent of the flesh, of the landscape around us, and of an unseen or otherworldly place. Colors resembling flesh, botanical, and earth tones emphasize the relationship between the forms, the body, and landscape. The scale of the drawings makes the forms, colors, and space more palpable for the viewer.

The articulation of lines represents a kind of constraint; the lines form boundaries, perhaps of culture or religion. But in these works, lines create a biomorphic form which is in the process of decay and metamorphosis. In the group hypotassō—Greek for subjected—I explore through the visual vocabulary what Paul calls the subjection of nature to decay. These forms and colors evoke ideas of bruised body parts, or a desolate, fragmented space. Similarly, the wall drawing mataiotēs—or frustration and emptiness—evokes an ephemeral landscape. Eventually, the drawing will disappear under layers of white paint, just as our own physical existence is temporary. The group eleutheria—or freedom—presents more dynamic and anthropomorphic forms that evoke life.

The idea of transformation in my process, and in my work as a whole, calls to mind something Philippe Taaffe’s has said: in the “imaginary worlds where artist is geometrician and mechanic, physicist and chemist, psychologist and historian, form constantly meanders from bondage to freedom through the play of metamorphoses.”

Decay is apparent through the suffering we experience in our lives. But this suffering will eventually end as everything will be redeemed and set free from its bondage to decay, as Paul assures in his letters to the Romans. Through the biomorphic forms and colors, I express the beauty and hope found in the midst of the decay and suffering we experience through nature and our bodies. The metamorphoses anticipate the end of this state of decay.
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