What do a medical practice and an art practice have in common? How can they inform each other? What transformations happen when they are allowed to bleed into each other? These are some of the questions I think about in my day-to-day work as an artist and medical professional. I am not interested in simply recreating or depicting the medical body in my artwork, but I am deeply intrigued by my interactions with the ambiguous, uncertain, and delicate instances that occur in both medical and artistic spaces.
I use drawing and painting as tools to make sense of human moments--some medical, some not-- that capture my attention and demand investigation. Why do certain encounters linger in my mind? I often don’t have the words to answer this question, so I create images. Through my image-making process, I speak to central themes: discomfort, boundaries, fluidity, loss, intimacy, variability. I gather and transpose shapes, forms, and colors from medical images and place them in conversation with different materials—whether within a drawing, painting, or print.
Mark-making is my way of documenting time and process, bringing me back to ideas of medical records, artifacts, and subjective human experiences. The spectrum of grays I work with reference X-rays or Ultrasound; I intentionally aim to uncover the unfamiliar aspects of familiar images that we perhaps take for granted. I bring colors in to remind of an underlying pulse, a tender humanity unwilling to be defined. Monoprints invite uncertainty into my artistic practice, watercolor allows me to play with transparencies and layers, and graphite and charcoal allow me to record my relationships slowly and softly to images. Finally, I turn to the book format when I want to guide viewers gently, urging a contemplation of comparisons, relationships, and references.