Understanding my work and my influeces

Understanding my work

My work begins with fascination. I am drawn to objects, images, materials, people, music, historical figures, memories, and fantasies that carry an emotional charge. Rather than beginning with a predetermined concept, I often work intuitively, allowing meaning to emerge through making, repetition, accumulation, and transformation.

At the center of my practice is the transformation of memory. I am interested in what happens when lived experience is reconstructed through art, when something painful, beautiful, absurd, fleeting, or impossible is redesigned into an object or an alternate reality. A memory may become a painting, sculpture, miniature environment, garment, piece of jewelry, photograph, book, song, or imagined place. Through this process, I am not simply preserving the past; I am reauthoring my relationship to it.

My work frequently uses seductive surfaces to approach subjects that are less comfortable. Fashion, glamour, dolls, rock-and-roll imagery, elaborate ornamentation, historical excess, bright color, crystals, studs, textiles, and highly detailed craft techniques can initially appear playful or beautiful. Beneath those surfaces, however, are recurring questions about identity, loneliness, beauty, obsession, desire, loss, reinvention, fantasy, and the emotional significance we assign to people and objects.

Accumulation and repetition are also central to my practice. A single object or image rarely feels sufficient. I create series, collections, environments, and interconnected bodies of work, returning to an idea in different materials and forms until it begins to reveal something new. This instinct toward multiplicity allows one idea to expand beyond a single medium. A visual work can become fashion; fashion can become narrative; narrative can become music; an imagined place can become an entire world.

I am particularly interested in the unstable boundary between fantasy and reality. Fantasy in my work is not simply escape. It is a space in which reality can be rearranged, exaggerated, beautified, questioned, or temporarily repaired. Humor often exists alongside grief, and extravagance alongside vulnerability. Something can be funny, glamorous, excessive, and heartbreaking at the same time.

Although my practice moves across painting, sculpture, mixed media, miniature environments, fashion, jewelry, design, photography, writing, and other forms, I do not view these disciplines as separate. They are different languages for investigating the same emotional territory.

Ultimately, my work is about the act of transformation: transforming memory into object, pain into beauty, obsession into repetition, absence into presence, and experiences that cannot be recovered into worlds that can still be imagined.

My Influences

The strongest connection for me is Niki de Saint Phalle. Not because my work looks like hers, but because of the permission within it: saturated color, femininity, theatricality, autobiography, playfulness, pain, sculpture, architecture and fantasy can all occupy the same universe. Her work can look exuberant before you discover how psychologically loaded it is. My combination of glamour and difficult material has a similar tension. And my dream of eventually creating environments rather than isolated objects makes that connection even stronger.

Yayoi Kusama is another major conceptual relative. My repetition is different aesthetically, but I have the same impulse toward obsession becoming environment. I am not merely satisfied making an artwork about an idea. I make another, and another, and eventually the idea wants its own room, soundtrack, wardrobe and mythology. The Museum of Me particularly pushes my practice toward immersive world-building.

Then there's Andy Warhol. My relationship with celebrity, rock music, fashion, multiples, consumer objects and the collapsing boundary between commercial and fine art is connected to Pop. But there's an important difference: my treatment tends to be much more emotionally autobiographical. Where Warhol could create distance through repetition, I often use repetition to get closer to something emotionally.

Tracey Emin, not stylistically, conceptually. Personal history becomes legitimate artistic material. Love affairs, longing, loss, objects and memories don't have to be disguised as something grander to belong in art. My instinct to turn my own mythology into the Museum of Me sits in that autobiographical tradition.

Joseph Cornell feels particularly relevant to my miniature work. His boxes turn collected objects into enclosed psychological worlds. My miniature environments are more narrative and funnier, but there is a similar idea that an entire emotional universe can exist inside a constructed little space.

My artist portraits are inspired by Cindy Sherman. I do not mean visual imitation. It is the idea of the artist becoming character, image and construction. My different personas can function as versions of self rather than straightforward portraiture.

There are traces of other people too: Frida Kahlo in transforming lived experience and physical suffering into personal iconography; Louise Bourgeois in memory, relationships and psychologically charged objects; and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the permission to let apparently chaotic visual information coexist rather than making everything polite and resolved.

But there is one other influence that is not a single artist: punk, glam rock and fashion culture itself. Studs, chains, safety pins, leather, stage clothes, album imagery, celebrity mythology and the theatrical construction of identity are not merely decoration in my work. They are part of my visual vocabulary.

And that helps me understand something about my practice:

I am not a medium-based artist. I am a world-building artist.

Painting, sculpture, fashion, miniatures, jewelry, graphic design, writing, photography and music-related work are tools. The actual medium is my personal mythology.

That's why the Museum of Me is not a cute title, but the logical destination of the practice.

I create worlds in order to understand the things I cannot leave alone. understand the things I cannot leave alone.

The fashion designers that have influenced my work the most are:

Gianni Versace: probably the clearest influence. The unapologetic glamour, hardware, rock-and-roll energy, bright color, and refusal to separate art from fashion all feel very close to my instincts.
Thierry Mugler: especially my tendency to create a character rather than simply dress a woman. My clothes belong to an alternate universe with its own mythology.
Vivienne Westwood: studs, chains, safety pins, rebellion, punk references and the idea that clothing can communicate an attitude before the wearer says anything.
Jean Paul Gaultier: my willingness to mix glamour, camp, theatricality and subculture. There is also that same sense that the supposedly "wrong" combination is often the interesting one.
Alexander McQueen: less because my clothes resemble his literally and more because of my approach: personal experience, pain, fantasy and autobiography becoming fashion.
Bob Mackie: this one should not be overlooked. My love of stagewear, spectacle, performers and clothes designed to be seen from across a room has a strong Mackie relationship.
Christian Lacroix: my maximalism. Ornament, historical references, embellishment, color and the willingness to keep adding something when a minimalist would have stopped three steps earlier.
Betsey Johnson: particularly the playful, rebellious American side of my work: punk filtered through femininity, humor and an almost deliberately excessive energy.
Jeremy Scott: also helps explain something particularly me: I am not afraid of an idea being too much. If the concept calls for studs, chains, animal print, neon, a ridiculous silhouette and a handbag covered in hardware, my instinct is not necessarily to edit it down. It is to make the excess coherent.

The Museum of Me exhibit with large framed portraits.