My new work was born from my experience as a parent to a young child during the pandemic. In early 2020, my professional and domestic lives collapsed into each other. My home studio now became the classroom where I taught college students. The TV room was my daughter’s school.

Against this was a backdrop of California wildfires that created days of smoky air that kept us all indoors. With my time in studio severely limited, I developed a nightly drawing practice to process my experiences, recording memory fragments and developing a kind of personal symbology.

When I was able to start painting again, the work was based on these drawings. The paintings are mind maps of sorts—a knit-together constellation of images and abstract forms. Connections are drawn, and stories told in a nonlinear way. Each painting becomes a topographic record built through improvisation, mistakes, and resolution. Through a reduced palette and this process-driven approach, the paintings evoke a sense of time passing, memory, loss, and physical transformation.