My work combines abstraction, collage, and gestural mark-making to explore how memory, place, and inherited family patterns shape identity. Being raised in Southeastern Ohio, my work is rooted in the landscapes and familial structures that have shaped me. I understand my personal history through stories as much as I do through lived experience, and this has shaped my perception and interaction with my past and identity. Many of my early memories exist in fragments, completed or reshaped by the women who raised me, so I turn to artmaking as a way to reconstruct these moments and explore why certain places continue to draw me in and inspire me. I revisit the spaces that built me: childhood homes, shared twin experiences, and the domestic landscapes that hold my earliest stories, to understand how they continue to echo through my present self. These locations become metaphors for recurring themes in my work: family patterns, cycles, the womb, growth, and transformation. These reflect my ongoing attempt to understand how inherited narratives and place-based experiences shape identity. 

Through painting, collage, and other mixed media, I work through a process that mirrors how memory is built: layered, nonlinear, and continually shifting. Even when working from direct observation, I abstract the landscape into fragments of color, gesture, and texture, breaking apart and reassembling the scene, piecing together a past that never existed in a single, fixed form. Collage and other mixed media allow me to merge different emotional tones, reflecting on how place lives in the mind as both reality and reconstruction. My paintings do not retell a story in full; instead, they capture the emotions and sensations that resurface when the detail of my memory is incomplete. Through this process, I examine how environment and memory shape one another; how returning to certain spaces can reveal lingering emotions, family histories, or unspoken narratives. The instability of memory is both personal and collective. I hope viewers encounter my work as a space for reflection, an invitation to consider their own relationships to place, memory, and the narratives that shape them. The landscapes I create are not purely representational; they are emotional and symbolic terrains where internal and external worlds intersect. Through abstraction and layered construction, I leave room for the viewer to enter their own pasts, stories, and ideas of home. 

Ultimately, my practice is an act of returning and remaking. It reflects the deep influence of the women who raised me, the landscapes that held my childhood, and the evolving understanding of who I am within those narratives. Through layered imagery and shifting forms, I explore the complex relationship between memory, environment, family, and the self. Moving forward, I am committed to deepening my investigation of place-based memory, expanding my use of collage and mixed media, and continuing to create work that reveals the shifting nature of personal and generational truth.