ABOUT ME

My paintings are a partnership with my younger sister Laine. She is on the autism spectrum, and people frequently underestimate her abilities because of it. Through my work, I explore one of Laine’s comforts: annotating books. I enact a parallel practice through my artmaking, both becoming closer to my sister and acknowledging the overarching humanness in our search for order. Laine boxes, underlines, and highlights words that end in “ence,” “ent,” “ance,” “ant,” names, numbers, and places. Her annotations, while calming to her, are chaotic and overwhelming to view at first. My sister finds comfort in her process of searching for patterns within the words of books. Likewise, I seek patterns in the words and colors chosen in Laine’s annotations and transcribe this data through paint, becoming an archivist and interpreter of my sister’s rituals enacted to find comfort.

My cross stitching and my portraits and abstractions on quilted canvas call upon quilt making’s domestic and collaborative history. My stitching process recreates the repetitive and meditative movements of marking words. In my collages, I take photos of Laine, dissect them for their abstract shapes, and reorder them into harmonious structures and compositions, thereby creating a parallel artistic order. Just as I extract data from Laine’s markings and translate them into my portraits, the collages I create are a reordering of information that mirrors the organization of words completed by my sister. The colors used in my paintings are the colors of the markers, pens, and pencils used by Laine in her annotations.

My work is an intimate exploration of my sister’s comfort and coping mechanism that allows me to become closer to her and learn more about her. However, the viewer and I will never fully understand my sister’s individual experience. Though my work attempts to access the inaccessible, ultimately, my paintings explore the human impulse to seek out or create patterns and find comfort in their presence.