"Community" Painting

My creative practice centers on noticing and valuing the interconnectedness of living things. Working across drawing, painting, collage, installation, and relief sculpture, I employ the grid to record the overlooked and undervalued labor, such as caregiving and support roles, that connect us. Each mark is modest on its own, insignificant in isolation, yet essential to the whole. The structure holds only because every mark, every action, is necessary and counted.

The grid is central to my work. It appears in city blocks and root systems, in woven textiles and transit maps. I use it as a symbol of the networks — social, natural, infrastructural — that bind us. It also provides a visual grounding: the steadiness of pattern, the clarity of repeated form. Its apparent simplicity slows the viewer's attention, inviting a closer, more deliberate look that ultimately reveals the human hand and the tension between order and imperfection. The minor deviations from order testify to a maker's presence.

In earlier bodies of work, I utilized fabric and thread, materials whose primary function is to hold and connect. In recent work, I trace the flattened geometries of cardboard packaging to construct a grid-like armature. These forms are carefully engineered to transform from two dimensions into three, allowing the form to protect and contain. I find them strikingly similar to sewing patterns, another flat form engineered toward dimensionality — a connection that links back to my mother, who taught me to sew as a child. Cardboard and cloth alike encode a quiet logic of care: instructions for the flat to become load-bearing.

Through all bodies of work, the grid becomes an argument, made in visual rather than discursive terms, for interconnectedness.