The Florist's Daughter 

Growing up in the floral industry, my education was built through intergenerational exchange of knowledge from my grandmother, to my mother, to me. I grew up in the backroom of my family's flower shop that has now been open in our small Eastern Oregon town for almost 80 years. I learned to draw, to paint, to be curious here. It will always feel like home. These works are a reflection of that upbringing by placing together encaustic wax, dried flowers collected on my family's property, and the use of silver/copper foil. They are playful in nature to capture that essence of the young girl who once made watercolors and small bouquets into the late afternoon hours. 

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Below: The Florist's Daughter, oil and encaustic on birchwood panel, 36x24in. 

 At the Altar of My Own Love 

Grief is felt in the body, as real as any injury. It is a heaviness, a physical ache formed. It is something that is ephemeral, fleeting in its presence, and yet able to permanently effect change. I feel this presence of grief within my own body. Its permanent alteration of the makeup of my form. It is a scar tissue that has healed over itself time and time again. 

 

Through the mourning of my past selves, of love once lost, my paintings come into existence. These paintings reflect a rebirth, a coming to terms with departure, and a love returning that I thought lost. I have pieced myself back together, one fragment at a time, finding beauty in the sharpness of my edges, and a relief in being able to settle into soft spaces once again. I capture this through my mark making, through the suffusion of color throughout my works, and an interruption of a traditional viewing format to engage the viewer in an intimate way. I work on a large scale in order to capture the breadth of these feelings of grief—where I shed my former self, emerging anew in my own love. 

 

With the use of both live and dried floral matter sculpted alongside these works, the concept of memento mori is represented—a reminder of death and the temporality of life. This temporality can apply to the fleeting nature of relationships, but their everlasting effect. One of rebirth and death. My paintings and floral sculptures express the process of grieving while seeking to understand a new reality. Smaller works within my portfolio act as vanitas—or vanities. These are capturings of fleeting moments of reflection, fragments of self and past loves, abstracting their presence as we let them go. I draw from my family heritage in the floral industry. By using dried and live floral matter in my work, I address the temporality of the human condition. This ephemerality, deeply beautiful in its essence, serves as a reminder to always seek moments of presence.

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Below: Exhibition shot of At the Altar of my Own Love at Aftertime Collective Gallery 

To Hold onto Lost Intimacies

To Hold onto Lost Intimacies, is a reckoning of loss and grief, and an attempt to understand the materiality of the body. At the center of this project is a thread—one of love, of sentimentality, of a transcendence of ephemerality.  I set about to use objects passed down to me through my family, taking rubbings of these objects on canvas, then reiterating them through paint with emotive color. I constructed canvases that are equivalent in height to my body and circumference of my waist to create a mirror of my experience with these objects. To me, these paintings act as bodies. They are ephemeral, capturing a fleeting moment of reflection of individuals and my relationships with them. This project was a reparation for my dysmorphic view of my body and how it exists in society, and a way to reflect on places of femininity and viscerality–two seemingly opposing agents. I sought to create paintings that could act as meditative, a place of reflection—allowing for myself, and potentially others to find solace.

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Below: The Gloves and the Daffodils, oil, encaustic, and charcoal on canvas, 71x25in. 

The dimensions of this canvas are taken directly from the artist's height, and the circumference of her waist. The gloves are made through the frottage method, creating an impression at the center of the body. These gloves were gifted to the artist's upon the passing of her grandmother. The daffodils represent the flowers that once grew in her grandmother's garden. The artist and her grandmother spent much of their time together cutting fresh flowers and making arrangements for their home.