Peculiar Places, Strange Spaces

I am the kind of person that would rather always be alone in the woods. Interacting with people can be exhausting and intimidating for me. I dislike comments similar to “smile more,” struggle with small talk, and am selective about sharing personal information. I grew up in Northeastern Tennessee, surrounded by nature and mountains, which provided me with an all-consuming sense of comfort. My relationship with nature is echoed in my paintings and prints, offering a similar sanctuary. During hikes and daily life, I often pause to marvel at small wonders such as leaf veins, cicada exoskeletons, Bryozoans, or twigs. I also have a deep love for the intricacies and oddities of mycology, underwater life, and botany. As a masculine-presenting queer woman, I have often felt that the world doesn’t readily provide a sense of solace. I channel my emotions, stemming from hardships in my life, into my art to gain self-understanding in relation to the world. ‘Alone’ has always felt like a physical location where I can truly be myself. Over the last year, I started to work with illustration, and I was able to inject humor into the pathos of my own experiences. Humor holds profound significance in my work. It serves as a driving force, a restorative process, and a bridge between grief, heartache, and refuge. My paintings represent fictional worlds populated with weird, funny, and oddly specific plants. For example, if I can control the environments of my plants and how they react to certain cataclysmic incidents, it gives me hope that everything in my own life will turn out okay. Peculiar Places, Strange Spaces reflects this journey, embracing a playful and deeply serious avoidance of judgement. This cluster of emotions has manifested in a series of paintings, zines, and a screenprinted field guide. 

In addition to considering the natural landscape, I have also looked to artists such as Inka Essenhigh, who dissolves solidity within her forms and spaces. It is as if everything is made of melted butterscotch, billowing drapery, or pluff mud hovering in midair. I find Ernst Haeckel’s hyperbolic fabricated Radiolaria forms in Art Forms in Nature and Leo Lionni’s refined and convincingly accurate imaginary plant drawings in Parallel Botany to be delightful, intricate, and surprisingly beautiful. 

In my painting process, I start out with loosely pooled and stained surfaces in acrylic. For me, there’s an intimacy, softness, or vulnerability of laying substrates flat, guiding the wet paint, and exerting less control over what the paint does as it dries. From there, I conjure a world guided by intuition. This process allows tension between specificity and chaos. The limited edition screenprinted field guide and zines that complement my paintings allow viewers to submerge themselves in my work, enabling them to wander, identify the depicted unreal plants, and even jot down notes. In printmaking, there is a level of control that I find satisfying that I don’t often have in my paintings. Screenprinting is a methodical and tedious process: precision is required. I obsessively create drawings of my plants in my paintings that find their way into my intricate and lively prints. 

I often find bits and pieces of myself in the critters and plants I depict; they stand, sit, loaf, and lurk as glimpses of grief and ache. These emotional states are something that I cannot simply wash away or rid myself of, but rather, must embrace as a part of my identity. The anguish that I’m referring to is hinted at through the dark wit of my titles that touch on my psychological states. For me, there is a tremendous yearning that is left over after someone leaves, dies, or things end, and I never did get to finish loving them. I like the idea of sharing my work with the world. If I do, then maybe there is someone out there who feels the same way, relates to it, or finds relief in the spaces that I’ve made.