Did the show’s themes emerge organically as you created the work or were these mostly ideas you set out to explore from the very beginning?
The themes and connections emerge organically as I go along. My approach is very intuitive — I don’t like to begin working with a preconceived idea. The themes always seem to reveal themselves along the way. The sketches for this group of paintings were all done last summer in 2023, when I was traveling in Japan and China. When I returned in the fall, I started all the paintings, and it took about all year to complete them all. Ostensibly, the paintings appear to combine elements from East and West, but in reviewing the implied narratives in the paintings, I see some of the characters struggling to communicate — from the boy carrying a mountain of crumbling Chinese radicals on his back, to the crane-turned-erhu with a muffled beak, to the cat soundlessly crying behind its caretaker. In Alluvium, the figure struggles to extrude the thoughts from her head and organize the accretions below, and in Scribe, the figure draws a listless, meandering line. The broken antlers in Deer II and Fetch evoke the feeling of loss, as if losing a tooth in a dream.
