Artist Statement

My work starts with a story, a traditional folktale or fable, or a contemporary poem or memorable phrase. The work itself is driven by the images that these stories evoke, and is propelled further by every brushstroke, mark making, blade cut, and gesture laid down in the aftermath. The stories and myths of a culture convey a sense of place, and a sense of the people who inhabit that place. In this way, visual art that interacts with a story enters a narrative sphere where it must encounter the local.

This body of work plays with the idea of art as an ongoing conversation with posterity in which artifacts of the past are painted over, yet traces of the original art remain—and using the cave-dweller as a metaphor for the fundamental human condition: forever shrouded in darkness and uncertainty, yet determined to leave our own visions upon the walls of the cave. We are story makers and shadow watchers. My work evokes memory, play, ritual, the dissolving boundaries of waking life and dreams. I use a balance of abstract and representational forms in order to sever the connection between shape and meaning, connecting the viewer instead to the gesture of the brush or cut of the knife, so that they become complicit in the art. Folklore, reverence and refinement of nature, and observance of daily life, are the concepts behind my work. Each scroll is hand cut Tyvek, some measuring as large as 20ft long and 4ft wide. The work is suspended from the ceiling, away from the wall using fishing wire. I draw inspiration from my heritage of traditional Jewish paper cuts. Jewish art reveals universal elements in its visual representation of animals.