Visual Inquiry
Making art is something I've reconnected with as an adult. As a child, art mostly meant colours, following instructions, and trying to make things look like the things they were supposed to represent. My relationship with it now is quite different. I find myself playing much more with colours and shapes, and with what they can come to mean depending on the context I put them in. Much of what I make ends up carrying something of what I'm feeling or living through. I tend to feel things quite intensely, and sometimes those experiences find a form in colour, in a figure, in a clean edge or a smudged one. I don't always make art in order to express something, but expression seems to find its way into the process anyway.
I also doodle quite a bit, often without thinking much about it. In a way, that has become part of the practice too. Shapes and forms begin to appear there, and when I eventually sit down with colours, I often already have some sense of what I want to play with. What happens after that depends on the piece.
Photobiography of the self
One of the things I've found most fun about making this series is hearing how differently people interpret the same piece. I get to hear what they see in it, and then I get the joy of sharing what was happening for me when I made it. I like that the two don't always have to be the same.
In these pieces, I've tried to represent an internal state or a feeling through my own lens, both how it feels within the body and how the world can appear from within that state. I play with colour across the person and their surroundings, sometimes letting one bleed into the other. The mind and the body are sometimes whole, sometimes fragmented. Boundaries are sometimes blurry, sometimes definite. The same figure returns across the series, but what it is experiencing, and the world it finds itself in, keeps changing.