"Facade of Normalcy" Painting

My practice returns, insistently, to the grid — not as a rigid structure, but as a calming, egalitarian space where every part holds equal weight. Its apparent simplicity slows the viewer's attention, inviting a closer, more deliberate looking that ultimately reveals the human hand: the imperfections and minor deviations from order that testify to a maker's presence.

Working across drawing, painting, collage, installation, and relief sculpture, I employ the grid to register what is overlooked and undervalued — each mark modest on its own, insignificant in isolation, yet essential to the whole. The structure holds only because every mark is counted.

In select bodies of work, I utilize fabric, thread, and salvaged cardboard, materials whose primary function is to hold, bind, and connect. In these pieces, the grid loosens into something more organic: an accumulation of small, repeated marks that resist perfect regularity.

In other works, 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 object 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 transition of the flat into the load-bearing.

Through my work, the grid becomes an argument, made in visual rather than discursive terms, for interconnectedness — a structure without hierarchy, composed of interdependent parts.