The ground is a shimmering turquoise. Deep hues of ultramarine blue collide into verdant swells of green and gold. It appears as though you are lying on the ocean floor, not far from the shore, where the rippling tide looks crystalline, and the shifting shades of fluffy clouds overhead blend into your sightline. The water’s surface ebbs and flows but it is not turbulent. There is a sense of serenity and stillness. You are not cold. Soft white light penetrates the haze and expands throughout the space.

Suddenly, something passes over you. It is not above the water’s surface, yet it is not precisely in the same space as you. Somewhere in between here and there, this form flows over you. It reveals itself at once fully formed and still forming, composing, and decomposing. The shape of the thing is elusive. Spherical bodies are interconnected like vertebrae. An undulating membrane runs through its center, a sort of stem to which the spheres are tethered. It is organic in appearance, but not inherently flora or fauna. You can see only a portion of it, yet you know it extends beyond the periphery of your sight, possibly outward endlessly.

Every sphere has a shifting energy, fluctuating in its own way. One appears to be bubbling out from a shadowy central zone, as if it had become too hot and boiled over, spilling out into the surrounding space. It feels like a great release of tension, quite cathartic. A lower sphere is far more nebulous, a dark inky blue fog permeates the region. Upon further looking, grainy striations start to materialize within the fog. This is a space of destruction and reformation, intense pressure compressing sediment, compartmentalizing to an unknown end. There is another dark and hazy sphere beneath it, but it is not as full of angst as its companion. There is quiet in this haze. It feels like the dust settling; a moment of calm after a period of much friction. Moving right, a nearby sphere is pierced by a golden light. The light emerges through and flows upward into a spiral, leading your eye to the most prominent moment of the form, a supernova, a complete collapse, and a rebirth.

It amazes you that the form can maintain stability. There is a constancy amidst this full cycle of change. The repeating curves of its internal landscape are unwavering in the face of uncertainty. You feel a sense of admiration for its resilience and complexity.

“Art work is a representation of our devotion to life.” Agnes Martin

When one is completely engulfed in a cosmos of change, one is inclined to struggle. It is frightening to be free-floating, pulled to and fro by forces beyond oneself. One tends to grasp for anything seemingly stable, a nexus, a safety net. More often than not, such points of security turn out to be as transient as the rest. To be alive is to be caught in an endless nebulous cascade of transformations and evolutions. I have spent most of my life struggling against this current, fearful of change, always clinging to people, places, moments in time.

My studio practice has become a way to meditate on the necessity of change in my life. Through devotional process-based painting, I can find wonder and excitement in unpredictable physical creations. I go to the studio nearly every day, and each time I make a painting in one sitting. Every painting is tethered by a repeating form; an undulating, spine-like shape that passes through it. I paint this form again and again, with fluid acrylics and pigments often on raw canvas soaked in water. It is a heavily physical process, using brushes, sponges, and my own body to apply paint. The results are heavily based in chance, due to the wet-on-wet technique, and once a piece dries, I do not return to it. Through this process, I find a balance, a sort of dance, between deliberate action and the agency of the medium itself. I forfeit the need to overly control the work, as each piece will grow and shift even after I walk away.

The image is far less important than the repeated act of creating. In this act, like a daily journal entry, each painting becomes a record of my experiences and emotions of that moment. Regardless of what emotional state I am in, or any external circumstances, these factors infuse and transform the work. The form may become enshrouded in layers of hazy stains, obscured, or a portion may be washed away completely, revealing the textures of the surrounding space. I can change any variable, but the form is always there in some capacity, containing boundless beauty and emotional complexity. Just as one may be when they adapt and evolve, not resist, change.

“You have to know how to use the accident, how to recognize it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once.” - Helen Frankenthaler

This series started almost accidentally. After my semester in London, I fell into a rut with painting for a few months. Everything I tried to do to recapture the success I had felt with my work in the spring was falling flat. The work just didn’t have it. Coming into the fall I was starting to feel very bad. I fell back on woodworking while I toiled and there was progress there, but I still did not feel the necessity in that work. I was very much just executing tasks, but there wasn’t much of a soulfulness in the process. It was dismaying to see all the momentum and creative freedom I had been feeling at Chelsea start to fade. I had a steady rhythm for a few months then, I had two shows that I felt fairly proud of, and I was confident in my ability to maintain a studio on my own. Something about the transition back to life in America completely threw me off. It could certainly have to do with all of the pressure I put on myself to keep up the pace, and the looming end of undergrad and thesis over my head, nothing seemed to be clicking for me.

My breakthrough came from about a month of furiously painting. I stopped stretching canvas, worked on multiple pieces at once, scaled them down, and upped the quantity and pace. I was working rapidly, and I refused to stop until I hit something. Working that way removes most of the pressure for me. When I’m sure the work will not lead anywhere, it usually does. This way of working sort of resembles fishing. I feel that when I lay out a canvas soaked in water, and I am floating around on it, waving my brushes and sponges like bait, eventually I may be able to pull something out from beneath the surface. I know a lot of things live down there.

I think this form revealed itself when it was ready. I am not exactly sure how it even materialized in the paint, but I felt its necessity instantly. It felt to me both new and ancient, essential and completely frivolous. The quality of its repeating surges and swells was quite mystical, yet shared a lot of logic with the math of growth and formation in nature. I felt totally seduced by it.

After that initial discovery, every time I would go to paint it felt like the only possibility. I did not even begin to understand what it might mean to me for the first two or three months of working with it. All I knew was that I needed to do it, and each time I did I was learning something new about its own agency, but also about painting itself, building intuition, and trust in some kind of work that felt beyond definability.

Months later now, though I can better articulate the significance of this form and way of working, I still feel like I have so much more to learn about what I am doing, and it becomes more interesting each day. To paint this way has become a part of my daily ritual, and I don’t plan on stopping until the form leaves on its own, just as it initially appeared; at which point I will accept the end of our journey together.

The byproduct of my daily process is an expansive amassment of paintings. Each individual piece holds its own spirit and potential. They contain the energy of a set and setting now passed. The subtleties of every palette and range of every texture and weight can each be encountered as a separate solitary experience. In assembling these remnants into a large-scale installation, however, I seek to immerse audiences in this world. I chose to mimic the way the pieces have grown around my studio space. As I would finish works and pin them to the walls, they would layer and intertwine. The truths of the work were revealed at those meeting points. have simply extended the layering gesture to react to the gallery space, and to give the pieces room to breathe. As the paintings begin to layer and grow across the gallery wall and spill out onto the floor, I want to explore the collective consciousness of the forms and allow for space without boundaries, where anyone can explore the transitions between physical planes, and contemplate their own relationship to change.