Artist's statement
Full Artist's statement
I began making art more than 25 years ago when my TV broke in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I wanted to do something more creative with my time so I began making unconventional mixed-media artwork through experimentation with found objects and different mediums.
In my new series called The Places We Forgot, I have photographed abandoned places across the country, including crumbling buildings, rusting cars, and a shuttered prison. I alter the photos with rips and layers of fused beeswax, damar resin, and pigments. The dreamlike images possess a strange, forlorn beauty amidst the broken glass, rotting wood, and rusted metal.
My work explores the malleability of memory and how our visions of the past shift from the comforting fog of nostalgia to a bittersweet sense of melancholy for roads untaken. Our physical spaces often are demolished or gentrified in the name of “progress,” but these abandoned places speak to our collective history and the resounding echoes of our past.
