Artist Statement

Shadow work is the descent into what has been buried — rage that had nowhere to go, the grief that never finished, the longing, the loss, the shame that settles in the body like sediment and stays. What goes unacknowledged doesn't disappear — it goes underground, grows heavier, pulls at us from below. Over time those unbearable pieces of ourselves get locked away, exiled because they were too much, too wounded, too wild, too raw to be seen. My practice is going back for them. Into them. Stepping off the edge into the unknown and trusting the descent. 

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My need to create comes from that same place. From anger. Sorrow. Hurt. Grief. Emotions deemed unacceptable, too volatile, too intense to belong. What lives in the shadows survives a long time in the dark — tending to what was abandoned, carrying what couldn't be carried anywhere else, preserving what couldn't survive the light. I come to meet it. I sit with it. I let it move through my hands. And in that meeting, something stirs — old, alive, insistent. Not a falling apart but a gathering — of force, of truth, of something that has been waiting a long time to have a body.

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My work is how I answer that demand.

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Each piece is an act of descending into the wound and probing it. With oil paint and charcoal and pastel and ink, the mark-making is a form of witness — to sorrow, to yearning, to rage, to the exiled and the unintegrated. Oil paint, with its slow burn and its depth, for the layering only oils can hold. Charcoal for the raw nerve. Pastel for the bruise. The canvas holds what the psyche builds — it holds within it gestational force and energy, imperfectly, with older things bleeding through.