ABOUT

I am a multimedia artist living and working in Cleveland, Ohio. Each piece of mine begins with comfort shapes and lines based on my childhood doodles: grids, x and y ordered pairs, and quadrants that filled my middle school notebooks. These are my 10,000 hours of practice.

Now I create layered works with handmade paper from the Morgan Conservatory, along with pens, acrylics, oil pastels, and spray paint. My process is a cycle between safety and survival.

Safety, in that I often start too cautiously, sometimes filling a shape with dots for hours to avoid the harder choices and to protect myself from making a “mistake.” This can result in no connection to the piece, no problem to solve, and the work feels contrived. So I’ll flip the paper and start again. There’s something about having already wrecked a beautiful piece of paper that allows me to work more freely. Plus I dig some of the marks that come through from the other side.

On survival: my work is an attempt to survive. If I ultimately do not connect to a piece, it is likely to be cut up, and I hope that one day it will be part of something that resonates. I often take scissors or a putty knife to a work I’ve finished but don’t connect with, and store the scraps for a future piece in shopping bags I keep in my studio.

Nothing is safe.

I have shown my work throughout Northeast Ohio, as well as in Columbus, Ohio, and Brooklyn, New York. I also started a project called ActLoCLE, a web-based art hub that provides community and visibility for makers in the region.