I make sculptural installations, paintings and drawings that explore both my sense of wonder in the natural world, and my fear and sadness about its destruction. With subjects both large and small—a cross-section of a giant tree, a canopy of leaves, shadows on a wall— I focus on the interactions between humans and nature to find beauty, darkness, nostalgia, and the desire for escape.

My two-dimensional works are landscapes painted or printed with watercolor, gouache, or acrylic. I play with how much detail is necessary to create a sense of drama and place. Distinctly rendered areas give way to planes of flat color or bleeding washes. In this way my drawings reference memory, where some things are remembered in sharp detail, against a hazy backdrop. In my series Blinds, I use watercolor and linoleum printing to explore feelings of isolation and longing. Paintings of imagined landscapes —a shipwreck, a burning building, a field of flowers, a crowd of people—are obscured by the bars of vertical blinds in a linocut-printed, flat, pastel apartment. Framing each image, the blinds create a series of visions caught between claustrophobia and escape.

I think of my sculptures as three-dimensional paintings, and I use materials and techniques associated with drawing or painting, like paper, stretched canvas, and silhouettes. My sculptures and installations contain the pictorial, expressive and narrative qualities of my drawings but they grow beyond the space of the paper into something more experiential. Depending on the needs of a project, I may incorporate construction methods from other fields such as handcraft, theatrical design, museum diorama, toy making and furniture making. I am interested in the tension and humor that develops between the evocative representation and the handmade construction of these sculptures.