Photo by Reece Straw
Painting Is Performance
I use painting as a language to think through experiences that live beneath the landscape of words. I believe painting’s freedom to inhabit different forms, play with its relation to the body, and test how we can experience painting imaginatively. I make paintings to build fluid architectures to choreograph how bodies, memory, and desire move through space.
I borrow tension, composition, and mythology from the music, choreography, and dramaturgy of performance. Gestural marks, spatial relationships, and movement become storytelling methods within painting, allowing it to operate simultaneously as image, character, stage, architecture, and event.
Working primarily with fabric, I construct paintings responsively to specific environments. These works may expand into immersive installations that surround and guide the viewer, or transform into wearable paintings that rest on and move with the body. Across these forms, painting shifts between backdrop and performer, architecture and costume, intimacy and spectacle.
I am interested in painting's fluidity to travel between the temporal and spatial structures of music, dance, and architecture. Through this movement, painting becomes a site of encounter: between body and fantasy, revelation and concealment, sensation and reflection, touch and distance.