My work in portraiture is interaction-driven. I get to know my subjects by taking candid photos and studying their unique body language. Focussing on the person in mid-motion, I capture raised eyebrows, crooked smiles and waving hands that we all use to communicate. This is a response to the deluge of Instagram and Facebook images currently flooding our daily lives. My intention is to reinterpret fleeting imagery by slowing down the process and hand-working it, slowly creating a permanent object from an image that we are accustomed to seeing swiped away by a finger. Ephemeral moments disappear unless made permanent in some way. My goal is to tap into the tradition of quilts and painted portraits as family heirlooms by creating contemporary portraits from these casual photographs that are snapped by cell phones, often live in the cloud, and usually disappear.

      My work moves away from the square/rectangle format of traditional portraiture by eliminating the frame. Figures are larger than life-sized and exist independent of any background, floating on the wall or in space. Each portrait becomes more sculptural, casts its own shadow, and lives in a space in a new and unexpected way. Our experience becomes more intimate; the figure invites the viewer to enter this personal moment and allows us to be in the same space during that captured moment. Hopefully, we slow down.

      I am interested in reinterpreting older works.  All of my pieces are subject to change as I search for new forms, and explore new ideas.  I add, subtract, and deconstruct to create a new work that carries the histories of the prior pieces.