Growing up in a small town in Pennsylvania, I have found that the quiet life in little communities surrounded by farmland have a mystical and spiritual quality to them. I have discovered that in the most mundane settings, something else exists beyond our visual plane. For thousands of years, our human species has had an obsession with what is just beyond our reach, something we will never obtain. This mystical suspicion exists not only in the hushed world of the rural east coast, but within the line of human experiences we all collectively share.

           My mother and I have had an interest in exploring family history over the past year. After her mother died, she was left with hundreds of family photos dating back to the 1800s. It was a strange feeling- to see my face in her young body, and hers in the young body of a distant grandparent, and so on. Every now and then I'll laugh the way my aunt does, I’ll make a decision that my grandfather would make, and I'll turn my head in the mirror and see a distant somebody that I have never met. I think about these parallels almost everyday, and how they exist within my own memory and lifetime as well. A manifestation of a past experience recreated and stripped down into a new form. There is a dreamlike quality to the images, a parallel world that you feel connected to, yet you will never discover more than what is in front of you. 

         My work resides in three mediums at the moment- painting, drawing, and photography. I chose to work with these three mediums because they are most immediate to me. My instinctive mark making has been handed down in my own blood. Some pieces show the surface more to emphasize vestigial memories in our own bodies. In my photo image making, I consider my perspective in terms of finding or searching for something emotional or mystical in our mundane world, whether it is rational or absurd. I use dreams and family photos as references to mimic the liminality of a human experience or lifetime that is part of me. Working with oil paint allows me to slow down and consider the purpose of my mark making, this process will then reflect in ideas considering domesticity and the unexciting reality we live in, paired in with an indescribable longing and mystical essence beyond our imagination.