A thread running throughout my work is confusion of the animate and inanimate, an approach to form leading back to the surrealists. My current project focuses on brushes and dusters. These familiar, humble subjects carry suggestions of domesticity, utility, and service. They are tools, used to clear away unwanted matter and ward off compromising elements. Against the saturated colors of the paper, the subjects act without the guidance of a hand, like the endlessly toiling, dumb marching brooms in Disney’s Fantasia. The anthropomorphic forms hover between male and female, object and organism. They blush, intermingle, wear decorative ruffles, become alien. Graphic line is employed in a gesture toward the territories of comics, narrative, and fiction.

These works are made on rough, tactile handmade paper with gouache, a medium chosen for its flat opacity. The textured surfaces of the paper and the layered marks of the brush bristles create a sense of physicality and evoke the tactile.