This work comes out of a desire to capture a sense of urgency or energy on the canvas. I initially had no intention of cutting the canvas or making space explode. When I placed the first gesture on the canvas, I immediately felt the need to expose space in a way that couldn’t be achieved with paint and material alone. It had to be transformed into the physical. The gesture—cut, painted, constructed out of material—acts as a re-inscription of the abstract expressionist brushstroke.

The figures in my work find themselves echoed throughout the paintings, attempting to connect, but failing to join and fulfill their sensual desires. Tender moments of touch are often displayed and repeated within these dreamscapes of skewed spatial perspectives and oddly vacant domestic rooms. With the tactility of thickly poured and splattered paint and the effervescence of luminously sprayed stencils, silhouettes of figures burst with divine ecstasy, often sensually interacting with other figures from a different realm. The emphasis on the figures’ faces and genitals,

I combine tropes of beauty with aspects of the monster to create female figures in which fascination and revulsion intersect. Beauty is a potent fantasy. At every level of culture, from Mattel’s Barbie to Botticelli’s Venus, the beauty of proportion, harmony, and unity of discrete parts has been celebrated. Nowhere more so than in the fashion magazine, from which I cull details—a pert nose, a set of gleaming white teeth, or blonde locks—to make paintings of gigantic malformed oddities fused from lumps of paint and scribbles of graphite.