I am a painter whose work is composed not only through the application of wet color on a surface, but through processes of disassembly and realignment, and the incorporation of common, everyday materials like thread and yarn. These activities and elements allow me to explore anxiety, loss, humor and heroic femininity. The hallowed and often masculinized tradition of painting is subverted in my work through a repeated process of cutting and then sewing painted surfaces together to develop new forms, dynamic connections and illusions of depth. Where these freshly stitched edges join, there is a seam, which has both linear and sculptural qualities. The seam acts as a geometric disrupter of curvy ellipses and other organic forms that are carefully rendered and then carved up with alternating precision and chance. The ghost of those cut edges has its own subtle presence. I am interested in developing a surface that’s full of the suggestive qualities that abstraction can create. The stitched paintings supply this through the deliberate recalibration of shapes and their relationships to one another.

In this collection of works, I start with a large piece of white cotton muslin fabric to create these paintings, first using a wet into wet technique that soaks the fibers, creating diffused shapes. After the fabric dries, I cut through the fabric in two, and by flipping or moving and then machine-sewing into other areas of the same fabric, the atmospheric shapes become dislocated. Sometimes the process reveals the hidden seam from the back, moving it now to the front. This process continues, over and over. The process is repeated until there is a balance in the work, while also maintaining some evidence of seams. I then tightly stretch the fabric. Color radiates through the pictorial space, suggestive of pattern though never achieving the regularity of pattern. In addition, the fabric is semi-translucent and when stretched, reveals the extra fabric of the seam from the back, creating an architectural white line that moves throughout the surface as well as the pictorial space. Embroidery or cutting shapes through the fabric are also strategies to create new relationships in the work.