Artist Statement:
The person, tapping away on a keyboard, to deliver this artist statement to you is not the same animal(s) who creates my drawings. If you ever meet me in person and shake my hand, you most likely won’t meet the animal(s) that draw my drawings, either; you’ll meet a socialized and sanitized person moving in expected “person” ways, remaining safe and polite. But, maybe, with eye contact or laughing loudly or an unavoidable moment of discomfort, we might sense the animal in each other - the ferality in each other.

I express through drawing line. Drawing a line is primal and direct and comes naturally to me. I layer lines to create movement, and sometimes I write on the drawings. I create many images of animals interacting through scribbles and lines, but you will not find these exact animals in an encyclopedia or national park. I am searching for moments when a shape or limb or organ I was not expecting grows on the paper because I used a stick to draw or my non-dominant hand or fisted the crayon and pressed it hard into the paper. I work primarily on paper, becoming a weather event or an animal that marks and stains the paper…puddles of coffee to change the color, or an ink blot that looks like a cigarette burn, or a slash of dripped canola oil to create transparency and now it looks like something has spit on the paper.

The animal(s) that draw are unconditioned, exiled, feral, or oppressed. I become animals I didn’t even know existed until I draw them. I am interested in the ways we would move our bodies, the faces we would make, sounds we would create, and the ways we would physically interact with each other as animals, if we were not socially conditioned to move our bodies, faces, mouths, and limbs in specific ways. When we act from a place of “animal”, the animal that we are, I believe emotions and intelligences are released; therefore, ways of relating and connecting are released, including ones that exist outside of what we have names or language for.