Artist Statement

My work utilized folkloric motifs of animals to reflect paradigms of human behavior. I incorporate deliberately mixed rendering styles and use a mix of traditional rendering contrasted with naive mark making to create visual asymmetry to question the assumptions and frameworks of values stemming from our natural and artificial environments. By utilizing animals and imagery of natural environments as archetypal representations, I challenge the varying relationships humans have with nature, and with each other. Utilizing assumed hierarchies to subvert expectations of the natural world to reflect human alien artificiality within the natural world to the viewer, I call those expectations into question and seek to understand the assumptions and boundaries of societal living. I utilize traditional art making materials and incorporate my archery practice into my work. Contrasting the abstract representations of folklore with something so deliberate and piercing as an arrow creates a stark contrast of the natural and artificial, further investigating the artificial boundary between human society and the natural world in the pursuit of creating an empathetic link to each other and nature.