STATEMENT

My practice is a phenomenology of bodies, an attempt to grasp the ineffable qualities of embodiment, of being a body. I attempt to paint, draw and collage bodies as they are affectively perceived—not visible in any proper sense, but palpably emergent—bodies caught in existential moments of fervent sensation. This is a pre-linguistic understanding of bodies as they are experienced. I attempt to grasp bodies prior to their construction through naming and being named, through fixing and being fixed in discourse. The bodies that appear in my paintings, drawings and collages can be understood in terms of tensions, balances, pressures, arousals, movements. I have, perhaps, a unique insight into this sort of visceral understanding of bodies from sixteen years of training as a ballet dancer. From that time of intense somatic practice, I have developed an innate understanding of bodies that exists outside linguistic constructions, a 'knowledge'—for the lack of a better word—immanent to my flesh.

This instinctual understanding of bodies has led me to develop a visceral aesthetic: a vivisection that attempts to show the intertwining of the quantitative truths of the corporeal body, with the qualitative truths of the phenomenal body. The visceral aesthetic is not a question of beauty or grotesqueness, but rather an attempt to implicate the spectator through automatic bodily excitations: tears, laughter, gasping, arousal, squirming, churning guts, goose bumps. I attempt to draw out this evocative experience by utilizing a strategy of dis-figuration. A dis-figuration is the process of stripping body—a whole harmonious thing—from flesh—the 'stuff' that feels and feels itself feeling. It is a dissemblance of the figure; the dis-figure is the "sensible form relating to sensation."1 Through distortions, fragmentations, reconfigurations, omissions, amplifications, the dis-figure emerges as an effort to bring attention back to one's own body, to renew "our connections to the world, of embracing our very being as flesh and nature."2


— November, 2011






1 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 32.
2 Lawrence Hass, Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 9.