Self-Portrait with Golden Cracks and Knots

I create art that helps to make sense of the changes in our lives. I burn figurative images of family, friends, and self onto grain-laden sheets of plywood. The layers of wood grain showing through the figures serve as metaphors for the passage of time and precariousness of our existence. I use this layering of wood grains to depict wrinkles on faces that show aging like rings on a tree. My medium and style allow me to delve deeply into the ways we are bonded as participants of sadness as well as joined together by resiliency and strength.

My aesthetic vision joins the universality time with the specificity of human moments. By using imagery from my personal life, I hope for my viewers to recognize their own concerns, struggles and successes. Moments in time set in rings of wood relay how small memories can be tremendous. Deceptively insignificant events enlarged and set within a timeline ask the viewer: What memories in your own timeline define who you are and who you will become?