Like the light from a deep-sea anglerfish, my work entices viewers to enter a world that is normally obscured by reason and fear. Death, childhood, and glitter are nostalgic devices meant to leave one giggling in the face of terror.

I start painting by donning a hazmat suit with a hood connected by hose to a fresh air supply, like an old bell diver. I lay the support flat and mix a two-part epoxy resin. After I add pigments to the resin mixture, I gradually heat it up before it solidifies. Although each painting is carefully planned, my best intentions are thwarted by the chaos created by the resin. Every painting is an alchemical experiment that cannot be reproduced, and yields many surprises, good and bad, when hung the next day.

I make paintings with soil gathered from places integral to my personal history. These paintings connect formally rigorous, nonrepresentational twentieth-century art with current concerns about our loss of respect for the natural world. Although everyone has seen soil before, most have not seen it in the way I present it: on the wall, defying gravity, extracted from its origin, aestheticized, honored. My work compels the viewer to reconsider something essential that is usually overlooked.

I am interested in ideas that convey a phenomenological disruption or reduction. My work is often based on family histories, childhood experiences, or on familiar domestic subject matter. Color plays an important role in the work that I make, adding symbolism and often an unsettling or unnatural element.

I investigate simple objects as cultural interfaces through which I navigate accord and discord. When trying to unravel complex issues, I am instinctively drawn to things that connect to my personal narrative as a point of departure: a comb, a piece of cloth, or a strand of hair. Charged with agency, objects have the mysterious ability to reflect or absorb us. I find my image, my personal story, in an object. But it is also the object’s ability to act as a rhizome, the multiple ways in which it can be discovered or read, that draws me in.

Mine is the liminal space between humor and pity. Instead of declarations, I make suggestions; it’s not my place to tell you what to think, after all. Really, I’m more interested in the foundational elements of storytelling, often obscuring the coherence or totality of a work in favor of something a little more scattered. My paintings mimic the form of story, but withhold any meaningful exchange of ideas. I call them impotent narratives. The structure is compromised: we’ve reached this recognizable end, but we’re not quite sure how.

My paintings investigate how humor facilitates the exposure of anomies, the social instability resulting from a breakdown of standards and values within a community. Cultural insight is layered behind comedic intent by way of archetypes built out of saturated transparent forms. Humor is not the end, but a means to afford access to topical issues and provides a fulcrum point between two simultaneous but oppositional viewpoints.

The term ‘Southern Gothic’ is partly defined as the exploration of socially induced issues and the act of revealing the cultural character of the American South. With my current body of work, I reinterpret various places on the periphery of many Southern towns and cities that are, for lack of a better phrase, on the fringe of society. As historian Bill Ferris states, “The American South is a geographical entity, a historical fact, a place in the imagination. The region is often shrouded in romance and myth, but its realities are as intriguing, as intricate, as its legends.”

My paintings are intricate systems of display that house arrangements of various studio artifacts such as scraps, found materials, and pieces of my children’s discarded drawings. Many elements are of lowly origins, massproduced remnants that are resuscitated within my paintings. Over the course of developing a painting, small, seemingly insignificant moments accumulate to form larger patterns. Intricate cutouts, paired with disrupted patterns and layered, gestural marks, create an unsettling tension. Disguised Xs and Os indicate hugs and kisses, but also uncertainty.