Glyphs and Vessels

This exhibition draws from two distinct series: Waiting Watching Spiders Weave, and Glyphs.

Waiting Watching Spiders Weave is a body of work I began slowly, after the California shelter-in-place order came down in the Spring of 2020. I wanted to make things that stretched out and filled time: something meditative and quiet. The process of hand coiling and weaving clay became a kind of daily rhythm, a way of grounding while the world was warping around me. I stepped back and watched my hands at work. The monoprints evolved as two-dimensional studies, exploring form flattened and physically pressed. These works function as a visual and material record of those pensive studio days, interwoven in our isolation.

The larger framed pieces in this show are a selection from my most recent series of paintings Glyphs. As I worked, these paintings began to split and formed two trunks.

Glyphs began dense. The surface was built up with layers of milk paint and my own studio-made clay and pulp ink. They came through a process of work and rework, folding marks into one another until a strong central form, that became a kind of talisman, appeared. Pointing loosely towards narrative, they explore transformative and ritualized studio processes.

As the series progressed the paintings became more elemental. Undoing layers, I began to strip back down to the essentials and focused on the energy that arises through the economy of brush strokes. They are works in motion, both spontaneous and instinctual. Though still exploring transformative process, they reach further towards more primary fundamentals: wind, rain and fire.