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 in line. Drawing a line is primal and I love how it feels to look at lines. I layer lines to create movement, and sometimes I write. I am excited when an unexpected shape or limb 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 into the paper hard. I like the feel of paper, and becoming a weather event or animal that marks and stains the paper…puddles of coffee to change the color, or an ink blot that looks like an ashed cigarette stain, 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 draws is unconditioned, exiled, feral, or oppressed. I become animals I didn’t even know existed until I draw them. What do our limbs and excretions actually do or communicate? What are the ways our body can really move but we’ve been taught not to?  What are the ways in which we sense each other and relate to each other that we haven’t discovered yet?