To understand who we are today; we must constantly strive to fully understand the foundations of our childhood selves. 

The creativity and wonder that had once driven my passions as a child can only be accurately reflected through the exploration of multiple mediums. Because of this, I work across a plethora of materials, with a recent emphasis on oil painting and charcoal drawing. To highlight the fleeting memories that come along with this nostalgia, I tend to pull inspiration from limited run animated series’ I grew up on, short lived early 2000’s fashion trends, and even the color palettes of toys stacked in my bedroom closet. Though the aesthetics display the joys and lighthearted nature of childhood (with soft imagery doused in many purples and pinks), much of the subject matter tends to stem from the hardships I had faced growing up in a poverty-stricken bible belt area of Appalachia. Upon entering adulthood, I’ve made it my mission to try to recount the parts of my upbringing I had blocked out of my memory entirely. In doing so, I constantly revisit the beginning, striving to understand who I was at my core in order to better comprehend who I am today. 

Many of these works depict family members from this era of my life, using symbols and patterns that I personally associate with the comforting items I held dear at the time. Fabrics such as quilts, floral bedding, wallpaper, and even lace curtains inspire much of this, along with stuffed animals and the church dresses I wore every Sunday morning. More recently, repetition and abstraction of these symbols have begun to merge with the figures, distorting them more the further back I try to reach into the memory I am recreating. Oil painting has been especially effective in expressing these ideas in my work. The juxtaposition of soft, feathered strokes with the chunky, gestural textures of others works seamlessly to convey the complicated emotional qualities present in the process of creation. The act of layering paint onto the canvas also reflects this idea of memory: no matter how much you add to certain areas or cover up others, the canvas will always retain those first impressions.