Artist Statement

I create drawings depicting an enchanting world inhabited by children and creatures.  Influenced by surrealists and children’s book illustrators, I seek to capture the inner life of my childhood self, exploring themes of introversion, melancholia, dreams and nightmares, and identity formation.

I build this world from outlined shapes and embellish it with gradations of shading and cross hatching.  Having been an introverted child, I feature characters, mainly girls and animals, with a similar temperament, having them serve as stand ins for my childhood self.  Surrounding these characters, I incorporate architectural and natural imagery inspired by what my childhood self resonated with, such as the medieval structures I would see in children’s fairy tales or the landscapes of my home state of Minnesota.  I arrange these characters and this imagery intuitively, generating symbols and patterns that give this world an associative context and, with that, underlying personal narratives.