Artist Statement

My practice stems from a belief that emotion is received guidance and can be translated, both accurately and for the purpose of joy, into non-representational visual language.

I work to bypass the labour of turning feeling into words. At the beginning of each studio session, I establish emotional parameters and formal restrictions to focus my attention. I use meditation and breathwork to enter a receptive state, and often complete my initial digital compositions in a single sitting so that mark-making remains close to sensation.

Removing representation eliminates a cognitive speedbump. It allows me to paint not what something looks like, but what it feels like.

My aim is subjective accuracy. I want each shape, colour and compositional decision to feel emotionally concordant with the inner instruction that suggested it.

The works that become oil paintings usually begin with a focused emotional brief. Their initial composition is fast, but their translation into physical paint is slow. The painting process allows me to reread the original impression over time, almost like transcribing an old diary entry.

The compositions that become prints on glass emerge from a more wandering state. They often move through positive memories and contain greater depth, layering and visual complexity. Their reflective surface supports the sense of emotional weather moving through the image.

My practice is informed by histories of spiritual and intuitive abstraction, feminist reappraisals of emotion as knowledge, and theories of affect concerned with sensations that occur before language. I understand intuition not as the absence of discipline, but as a precise and sustained practice of attention.