My immersive, collaged works on paper draw on the language of maps. The impetus for this body of work was my longing to connect to my father, a long-haul cross country truck driver. Based on road maps of the United States, routes my father often traveled, and an invented conglomeration, mutation, and fragmentation of those passageways, my works on paper help me piece together the past and make up the parts I cannot know.
These mixed media abstractions map not only physical locations but also psychological and emotional spaces. My pieces are unplanned, compelling me to put myself in an explorative mode, employing the abstract space of the map to create a pliable structure for intuition, improvisation and chance. Connecting paper fragments together through collage, drawing, painting, staining with salty washes of ink, printing, stitching and cutting paper have become my methods for navigating the blurry terrain of memory and imagination.
Through my work I often think about how the retelling of our stories, the reconstruction of our journeys, helps us make sense of the now, and how the retelling is its own journey. Mapping serves as a metaphor for searching, an implication of the unknown in wide, open spaces, and a trace of how we see where we've been.
