Threshold Arts

Here are some selected pieces from my most recent show at the gallery in Silver Dollar II in the Old Town / China Town neighborhood of Portland, just bordering the Pearl District. 

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“Inheritance” is the shorthand I’ve chosen to describe my process and project around creating this body of work. The more we learn about epigenetics and historical trauma and the like, the more I’ve found myself thinking about what we inherit from those who came before us, for better or worse. And as a mother to a young child, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of world we are leaving to her, to all our children, and what we will tell them about what we have or haven’t done to mitigate the bad and offer up the best of what we ourselves have inherited. With that in mind, I approached this body of work as an exercise in navigating what we’ve been given, sometimes applying that quite literally. To this end, I’ve used poppy seed heads harvested from my garden, leaves collected on family walks, snail shells, and sunflower pollen. A family of crows living in the pine tree in my yard has bestowed its feathers upon me. There are canvases that began as explorations with my daughter, who I began painting with when she was just one year old (she’s now four), sometimes in my oils and sometimes her tempera paints, because she rejects working on a surface more than once and I can’t bear to waste them. In a less literal sense, many of these paintings explore the inheritance of perspective, the ways we’ve been taught to see and perceive and how those perceptions can shift and change upon closer inspection. What appears solid and certain under one circumstance can become more organic and fluid. Exterior and interior, foreground and background, representation and abstraction, can shift and change places.