I work within oil painting’s long history of depicting universal archetypes, symbolism, and the body. Drawing from art history, cinema, and tragedy, I aim to create images that feel at once tender and disquieting. I am an avid consumer of the writings of psychoanalytic theorists, namely Julie Kristeva, Otto Rank, and Carl Jung, particularly the concepts of abjection laid out in Kristeva’s 1980 essay collection Powers of Horror, and I process that consumption on the canvas: asking how primordial images, derived from myth, legend, or fairy tale, remain in our unconscious and continue to influence how we respond to history and narrative.

Recurring images fill my painted worlds: birds, deer, rolling Appalachian hills exist next to mythical beings and references to magical realism. Influenced by Gothic and Renaissance iconography, as well as cinematic staging and domestic interiors, I often place figures at the edge of an action or in its aftermath, during moments of psychological rupture. The depictions of human and animal bodies become sites where ritual and care are enacted. By positioning innocence as threat, maternal as ambiguous, etc, I create reversals to call into question expectations of these archetypal figures.

I paint to create still theater. Situating tragedy not as spectacle or exploitation, but something to sit with, where the “actors” within these moments complicate what their roles are expected to mean.