Artist Statement

I work with symbols—birds, hands, vessels, trees—forms that have carried meaning for centuries. They appear in folk art, religious iconography, and oral traditions, shifting shape and weight over time. I don’t see them as static relics but as living signs, evolving with the present and taking on new contradictions.

An intercultural life has drawn me to cultural allegory—the way meaning is carried through proverbs, folklore, and religious imagery. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush—but in another telling, it’s worth ten in the forest. The same proverb stretches across cultures, shifting its meaning. My work exists in that space of uncertainty, where familiar symbols slip between interpretations, unraveling—only to reemerge elsewhere, clearer than ever, upside down, right in front of you, as something you’ve always known. Only now, it speaks in foreign forms.

My work is shaped by traditions that sit between the sacred and the ordinary—Books of Hours, Pennsylvania Fraktur, American and European folk art, medieval tapestries, and Transcendentalist painting. These influences aren’t just aesthetic reference points but living languages, guiding how I build images. I’m interested in how ornament becomes meaning, how repetition turns into ritual, and how the handmade carries presence.

In the studio, I work between clarity and distortion. Some pieces come together with quiet logic, while others resist, unravel, and demand to be rebuilt. That tension—between order and disorder, tradition and reinvention—is where the work lives.

At its core, my practice is about looking at the past without treating it as fixed. In art, we have the privilege of abandoning time. My work is an attempt to recognize how symbols persist, how stories reshape themselves, and how history keeps folding into the present.