New Work-- 2019-2023
After becoming a mother, my relationship to time changed and warped. I am awake more hours than I used to be and am busier than before. Yet, there is also a lot of downtime in my day when I am feeding or holding my sleepy daughter. Motherhood is paradoxically a very lonely time, but also a period when you can't get enough time to yourself. As a parent, some days using the bathroom is the only small break you can get. Where do your thoughts go when you get that break? Those brief, flickering thoughts that come and go so quickly between so many other things have become the subject of my work. Sam Anderson wrote, “How many fleeting associations combine to make up a life? How many rusty pipes do we mistake for owls? A vast majority of our waking hours are filled not with witty jokes or brilliant thoughts or epic feelings but with tiny, private mind-motions — thoughts that are hardly even thoughts at all, that don’t rise to the level of sharing with another human being. That millisecond when — again and again — a rusty pipe looks like an owl, or a newscaster’s voice reminds you of a long-gone uncle, or a daily routine sets off a small chain of involuntary associations. These things are almost nothing, and yet they are who we are.” These uncatchable, ghostly thoughts are almost impossible to notice and then adequately describe-- the perfect shadows of two curators on a wall; the dog walker I looked forward to seeing from my window during a snowbound quarantine; that gray lady on a smoke break, seen over a decade ago, blending in with three gray columns; startling myself awake from a nap because I thought I was falling. The act of painting these fleeting thoughts is an attempt to capture a nearly invisible, but very large part of being alive.