My recent paintings pair objects with gesture and conventions of painting, investigating gender and identity. As I incorporate items — my son's discarded fishing lure, a can of tuna, false eyelashes — I take away their accepted function, asking what something becomes when it is not useful. I believe deeply in the beauty and bravery of not fitting in. The painter Dona Nelson said that one of her favorite things as a child was to dig a hole and see what was in it and that painting connected her to this. I feel this, and the work digs in a bodily way into time passing, from pre-verbal childhood to my life as a parent. I find agency in the reshuffling that collage allows.

A recent painting has butter labels flying between two legs from my jeans that emerge from slits in the canvas. The iconic label reminds me of making pancakes as a kid, and are also symbolic to me of my recent two years living in France. Positioning the labels between the legs brought up my rage at the rape scene from The Last Tango in Paris and the increasing battle women face in having autonomy over our bodies. Giant cartoonish labia are projected onto a large phallic shape that arcs overhead, swirling with a jump rope and suggesting to me the ‘flickering nature of gender” as described by gender defying writer and poet Maggie Nelson.

A plastic snorkel or a potato masher — objects pull my paintings towards sculpture. There is a somatic and a performative aspect I’m exploring — the painting is putting on bathing suit bottoms, it’s opening and closing it’s eyes. The edges are important — the paintings tend to sneak off them and the edge feels not just like where, but when and IF the painting ends. I want it to be as fully alive as possible and to be surprised by the work more than I want it to be resolved.