METAMORPHOSIS

My work begins from a question I cannot answer and cannot stop asking:

What if God is not a perfect, all-and-only good being above the world, but the intense need to exist that lives inside every atom and every form? What if the point of existence is simply to BE and to be perceived in every shape it can take, the grotesque as fully as the beautiful?

I know this need because I am full of it. A desire to create so intense it fills me to paralysis. I do not want to eat, to rest, to speak, to do anything but CREATE, OBSERVE and BE. And the more my life demands of me, the more the pressure builds with nowhere to go.

This is not a metaphor I designed to justify the intensity and ugliness of my work. It is the thing itself. I believe God is that same pressure, the need-to-exist, and I feel it straining desperately against the inside of my own body.

So I am drawn to the body at the edge of itself: swollen, bruised, distended, too full of its own pressure to be SOMETHING. I draw faces that surface from raw, frayed canvas, and forms marked by dense, obsessive expressions of red, the pressure made visible, a pushing, pulsing fullness that has to go SOMEWHERE.

I believe the forms we are taught to find ugly are not failures of the human form but full presences of the divine. To draw them with dignity is an act of devotion to the nature of perceiving the world around us.

To me, God is not only in things but in what happens and in the act of observing them.  Not just matter, but experience, existence and perception. And because the point of everything is to exist and to be perceived, every perception an artist offers and every different way it is received is part of what gives this world meaning.

My work is one such offering: grief and desperation in equal measure, the work of a human being, a woman, trying to evolve faster than her own hands can yet move.