With the Art as Activism grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, I created plantable art materials from natural items, organized a community event to create art with them, and planted the artworks in a blighted lot, transforming it into a blooming native pollinator meadow called “Perennial”. This meadow is now actively living and is located at the end of Grandview Ave. in Bellevue, Kentucky.

Materials used to create the sustainable art supplies included Walnut inks and watercolor paints made with Indigo, Madder Root, Onion Skins, Goldenrod, and Marigolds. The plantable paper used was made from recycled newspaper and other plant matter and was filed with native seeds like Coreopsis, Black-eyed Susan’s, Bee Balm, Goldenrod, and Coneflowers. These species should continue to reseed themselves creating a low maintenance, pollinator haven, which cures an area of blight in my home city.

In this series, Penchant, I am exploring our culture's obsession with consumption and waste by analyzing our relationship with garbage. Through artifacts left behind by great societies throughout history, we can determine how cultures lived and what they most valued. How will future societies view us? What will they conclude about the way we attempted to solve our problems? I believe a society built on convenience and individualism will be found, since our layer in time will be filled with unsustainable waste. I paint our blind relationship with the things we throw out to bring a more mindful awareness to the ways we consume - a theme rarely discussed in gallery settings. Through experimentation with color and texture, threatening piles of trash evoke feelings of curiosity and playfulness while creating a sense of foreboding doom. While acidic skies and towers of trash teeter on the edge of eruption, the viewer is still able to find comfort within these treasures. Penchant bridges gaps and invites everyone to the same page by demonstrating an immediate level of impact on climate change in our daily lives. This series brings to light our relationship with waste in hopes of convincing others that even through the endless social and economic issues compounding around us, our planet is always of the utmost importance.

As an artist, I use my paintings to fight for what I feel is most important: the environment. All of my work is inspired by nature, often times its most misunderstood subjects. My earlier work focused on the mysteries of hive-mind societies and the vast worlds of fungi, where color and composition brought my viewers into their cryptic realms. I have more recently completed a series of trash paintings titled “Penchant”, which calls out our culture's overlooked obsession with consumption and waste. All of my works aim to change my audience's perspective and confront their ideals of beauty, hierarchy and individualism. I place focus on the micro life of an ecosystem, showing how little puzzle pieces build up and contribute to the whole that we are all experiencing. By zooming in and eliminating distractions, my work naturally falls on a border somewhere between reality and surrealism.

I wanted to bring this concept to my paintings of the Black Rock Desert, an innately surreal place all of its own. While most assume its surreal qualities come from the vastness of its terrain, causing misjudged perceptions of distance and heat waves that creates the appearance of water on the playa, I was able to find these same elements in the desert's smallest objects that often get lost in this vastness. I focused mostly on the geology of the area and how these surreal sculptures created by the planet not only capture these qualities, but also reveal the dense history and delicacy of life in the desert. I feel to better protect this fragile landscape, we must first understand these smaller impactful forces. By educating ourselves and finding the beauty in life's little things, we can better assess and understand how to preserve the whole of an environment, making it a better place for all.

In the Swarm series I am exploring the concept of emergent intelligence in species that survive as a collective. By using the vehicle of the swarm I am able to create what appears to be abstract drawings while rendering the subjects realistically. I want to confront feelings of fear normally associated with these kinds of organisms, while still showing how beautiful each one of these occurrences can be. 

Nature has always inspired my work in both concept and form, therefore the majority of my pieces are environmentally centered and are about naturally occurring phenomena and behaviors. Pulchritudinous is a series of fungi paintings that displays the sheer variety of species and beautiful patterns that hail solely from our local area. Fungus has never been revered for being beautiful, but by taking a closer look at these magnificent recyclers, the viewer is able to see the intricate patterns and wide spectrum of color that was there all along. Even the word Pulchritudinous is an ugly term at first sight, but quite literally means “something of great physical beauty”. By playing with techniques that make objects appear more attractive, my work revolves around a change in perspective by viewing that which we look at negatively in a new light. By questioning and altering our perceptions of beauty, these works open our minds to accept the nontraditional.

In my series, Apophenia, I am examining instances in which one can mistake randomness for recognizable figures or features, such as a broken tree branch appearing as a bird in flight. In this interpretation of Apophenia I am looking for these patterns in plants specifically.