Artist Statement

I am drawn to materials that change as I work with them: ink moving through water, flowers breaking apart, smoke shifting through light, paper folding into unexpected forms. I am interested in what happens when I begin with an intention but allow the material itself to influence what the photograph becomes.

Much of my work is created in real time in front of the camera. I introduce materials, observe how they respond to one another, and photograph as forms emerge, collapse, overlap, and disappear. Light becomes another material within that process, revealing translucency, texture, movement, and small changes that might otherwise go unnoticed.

I am especially interested in the point at which something recognizable begins to feel unfamiliar. A flower may blur into atmosphere, water and lint may begin to resemble terrain, or an ordinary material may take on an entirely different presence. Photography gives me a way to stay inside that transition, somewhere between observation and abstraction, control and response.

Influences

My background in painting, art history, psychology, and art therapy continues to shape the way I make and understand images. I am drawn to the physicality of painting, the ambiguity of surrealism, and the emotional directness of expressionism. I also return to artists such as Andrew Wyeth, whose quiet attention to atmosphere, surface, and stillness has long resonated with me.

Nature remains one of my most persistent influences, not simply as subject matter, but as a model for change. Water, erosion, growth, decay, weather, and repetition all offer ways of thinking about transformation and impermanence.

Where We Meet

I do not want the photograph to resolve everything for the viewer. I am more interested in creating enough recognition to draw someone in, while leaving enough ambiguity for their own memory, association, or interpretation to enter.

The image begins with my materials and my way of seeing, but it is completed differently by each person who stands before it.