Current artists statement & a few thoughts from others

My work looks at the patterns of social and behavioral expectation in relationship to individuality, particularly as it exists within the home. I am exploring stereotypes, and social expectations and how individuals negotiate a way through them in such a way as to develop personal identity. I appropriate visual patterns from traditionally domestic decorative elements, such as fabric; wallpaper, plate ware, and furniture in order to draw attention back to the home in order to reconfigure notions of what “home” is. I replicate these patterns at times with deviations from them, be it slight of extreme. The pattern is the layered more patterns with varied levels of deviation and expressive marks to illustrate the building up of experiences with expectations and norms. I am interested in representing the way individuals either adapts themselves to expected, or adapt the expectations to themselves, expressing individuality and reconciling with social norms.

A now for little taste of some of my research...

“The force of habit may be said to spring from the sense of order. It results from our resistance to change and out search for continuity. Where everything is in flux and nothing could ever be predicted, habit establishes a frame of reference against which we can plot the variety of experience.” E.H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A study in the psychology of decorative art

“painters love paint itself, so much so that they spend years trying to get paint to behave they way they want it to… It is the paint that is so absorbing, so deeply attractive, that a life spend in the studio can be a bearable life.” James Elkins, What Painting Is

“ Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing…Beauty is a value, that is, it is not a perception of a matter of fact or of a relation: it is an emotion, an affection” George Santayna, The Sense of Beauty