Fabric, embroidery, paint, canvas, and a frame: these ingredients in my work allow for two stories of the body to be played out in my practice. There are the abstracted and representational forms in my paintings referencing the body; its parts, processes, and experiences, as well as the physical process of my body making them. In my paintings I can make all these disparate materials something whole, but there is always a lurking moment to see beyond the wholeness, into the anxiety of fragmentation. I think about what the body feels: extreme pleasure and pain. The ability for these two sensations to co-exist is a paradox. The body loses containment for example, ridding itself of poison by ejecting it through it’s orifices, it can then become healthy and whole again. These ruptures happen in many ways, they are physical moments and psychic ones. My experience oscillates between these two, a feeling comes from the inside out or is affected from the outside in and the skin is the barrier and surface between these. Featured on the NAP/Blog: September 18, 2013