Certain Dark Things is an ongoing series of paintings born of Pablo Neruda’s “Sonnet XVII.” I have used this piece of writing as a place to begin, and its themes of secrecy, love, and darkness as a place to pull imagery from.

As the series has evolved, the forms have simplified, the velocity of mark making has slowed, and the idea of presence and monumentality have come to the forefront. Viewers are asked to find their own presence and their own body in relation to the presence of these large-scale forms.

The forms themselves symbolize the body as a container for the self, a vast space of imagination and pure potential, pushing out into the world on its own terms, making its own rules about how much to reveal and how much to conceal.