As tides rise and fall, the ocean leaves all sorts of shells, glass, plastic, and driftwood on the beach. This debris comes in with the waves and gets left, half-buried in sand or caught in tidepools. Almost all of these are fragments of what they once were, now separated and smoothed by the force that brought them in. Beachcombing—a method of tracking and treasure hunting for things that once were whole but have since undergone a forceful change—requires attuning one’s eyes to the smallest shifts in color, sheen, and texture on the beach in order to notice and identify these fragments.

The paintings I’ve made over the last several years act as visual archives of a similar process. Fragments of shells, hearts, flowers, waves, volcanoes, and infinities all go through a metaphorical tide shift, losing and gaining parts of themselves as they break against each other and rearrange. I see the images that come together as portraits of loss; in each I am trying to recognize something that is no longer as it was.