“The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, an art which one can see has let itself be thrown by the explosions of the last week, which is forever gathering up its limbs after yesterday's crash. The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, holding fast to the intellect of their time, bleeding from hands and hearts.”
–Dada Manifesto, 1918

Nearly a century after Tristan Tzara penned these polemical words, arguing for an art that bleeds along with society, we continue to live in a blatantly violent age in which the duality of politics – veering between reason and irrationality, prudence and excess, action and impotence – plays out in our seemingly mundane lives. In my work, a cartoon character, the Blob, is quietly blown up, hung, slashed and bruised. She hovers in a state of tension between naïve play and nameless cruelty. As the initiator of these conditions, the character functions for me as agar in a Petri dish, a seemingly neutral vehicle for the mingling and festering of my own fears and anxieties. My work is driven by an impulse towards the political, the personal, and the absurd. Living in a cultural moment that readily renders trauma monumental and in the collective, I am loath to create works that are didactic and point to ready ideologies. Rather, I am more likely to harness the tools of satire to subvert traditional political and cultural commentary and representations of violence.

I am interested in an object’s capacity for material dialogue. Compare, for example, the narrative quality of a line embroidered in thread on raw textile with an etched line drawn (also with a needle) into wet clay with the efficient line of the cartoon panel. This translation and retranslation of drawing across materials forms the basis of my studio practice. My choice to work in textiles was influenced by my professional experience as a theatrical costume stitcher. The construction of period costumes required a minute attention to detail and a deft manipulation of textiles. When translated into sculpture and image making, it is an approach defined by laborious and intentional construction and execution. For me, this highly aesthetic approach is an uncanny vehicle for wit, play, and black humor. I am equally influenced by satire and tragicomedy, drawing upon my work as a political cartoonist during my undergraduate studies, an activity that deepened my fascination with the relationship between art and politics and also the rhetorical and narrative functions of image and iconography. What is consistent in my mixed-media work is the primacy of drawing and iconographic subtext.

My primary influences are Saul Steinberg, William Kentridge, Kara Walker, Grayson Perry, Martha Rosler, and Hieronymous Bosch. A varied grouping to be sure, but what attracts me to these artists is a thread running between their works that situates the viewer as witness to personal and allegorical narrative cycles that simultaneously engage history and lunacy. Theirs is work that spans drawing, animation, installation, ceramics, photomontage, and religious painting. I adhere to a cross-disciplinary mode of art making that negotiates and draws relationships between sources as disparate as the symbolic and ornamental rendering of torture and violence in medieval Christian art and the slapstick comedy of popular cartoons.