My current body of work, including both painting a ceramic sculpture, is generated from landscape photographs taken on recent trips and images sourced from my family’s collection taken around the tidewater Chesapeake Bay area.
In the paintings, these photographs are recomposed as geometric abstractions derived from the color studies in Josef Albers', ”The Interaction Of Color”. This process involves tilting the image, flipping the horizon line, cutting out a part of the landscape, or creating colored transparencies with chiffon. These gestures serve to suggest an alternative way of thinking and identifying our memories embedded within landscapes, where nothing is absolute and everything is relative. The paintings pair flat and smooth masked airbrushed gradients with textural materials such as sand and burlap.
Unlike the systematically constructed paintings, the ceramics vessels are organic and built with improvisation. These sculptures, textured and sprayed with underglaze, mimic swatches of the natural world. The textures reference grass, waves, or rocks and the sprayed color creates light, shadows, and gradients covering the surface. The vessels evoke a sense of home within these landscapes.
This body of work highlights the malleability and impermanence of our predetermined systems of seeing, memories, and psychologies over time. It forms a space to contemplate points in our past, perception, conditioning, and our relationship to the life cycles of the landscapes we inhabit and passthrough.