I am fascinated by the process of blooming—burgeoning life, vitality, beauty, and things coming into being—as well as complementary processes of decay and decomposition—that which encompasses ugliness, deterioration, and festering flesh. Decay is both the precondition for and fate of the evasive state of beauty, a common object of desire. Decay is both the beginning and the end in the cycle of beauty.
Blooming is also a significant component of any female-bodied experience.
My practice is imbued with a dual understanding of femininity as both essentially elegant and grotesque. Women and girls are often linked to motifs of blood, birth, incubation, purity, impurity, flowers, and pastel hues (especially shades of pink).
I am inspired by unhinged women—spinsters and widows, Edith Beales, Miss Havishams, and Lady MacBeths—women who live in both luxury and detritus, and who are cast apart (by their own volition or not) from mainstream society. I am also interested in the breakdown of sanity that occurs behind the façade of extreme affluence. This body of work explores the affinity between femininity and madness and the creeping horror of ostentatious wealth.
A cornucopia of spoils, a harvest gone awry, two flies perched delicately atop a chalice of hairy raspberries: I hope that my images equally delight and disturb.