Artist Statement
How people arrange their domestic spaces – living rooms, kitchens, bedrooms – speaks to their thinking process and other cultural, familial, and environmental forces in their lives. I draw interior spaces in order to reveal personal geometries and expose my relationship to these spaces on paper. I want to illuminate the ordinary with an intensely focused way of looking.
My drawings investigate home environments to reveal relationships between perception and memory. By drawing banal, simple objects in domestic interiors, I locate meaning by revealing the particular, and perhaps uncanny and unsettling, psychological characteristics of the places we call home.
The drama of my relationship to space is enacted on paper, giving a voice to the unease and awkwardness that I feel concerning domestic residences. The experience of drawing gives me access to memory – the memory of my childhood and family life – and to the higher meaning that I attribute to household objects. The drawing process connects my thoughts with tangible objects and spaces, and my pieces become dense meditations embedded with the act of seeing and sensing.
As I attempt to replicate some semblance of reality, smearing and pushing charcoal around on a page is calming and invigorating. The act of rendering becomes meditative, providing a place where I can concentrate and still my mind while giving form to my unspoken thoughts. Making these drawings requires much time, and it attempts to honor the space by giving it careful attention. By choosing to slow down and look at space differently, I transform something ordinary into something extraordinary.
My spaces are personal but do not feel comfortable. In his book, The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler describes the uncanny as “the disturbing unfamiliarity of the evidently familiar.” I am interested in how the uncanny inhabits people’s home environments. The uncanny is found to be the “absence of overt terror” but remains deeply unsettling. Vidler describes the emptying of space in modern architecture: “If houses were no longer haunted by the weight of tradition and the imbrications of generations of family drama, if no cranny was left for the storage of the bric-a-brac once deposited in damp cellars and musty attics, then memory would be released from its unhealthy preoccupations to live in the present.”
My drawings exist as a perpetual present tense. I remove people and objects that signify human interaction in order to access the memory of permanence. Simultaneously focusing on the common and removing the distractions of daily life exposes the most basic, underlying character of my relationship to the space.