My ongoing journey of making a personal world and language is primarily based on the rituals or everyday activities that I consider meaningful, ceremonial, or memorable. These rituals share a common methodology: “mapping.” I think of mapping as actively navigating, discovering, searching for directions, or thinking extensively.
(a) Mapping as “Playing” includes activities such as the following: trailing, strolling, collaging, close-looking at design history embedded in everyday life, and collecting images of mass-produced, manufactured designs, icons, miniatures, menus, grid forms, parts of interior spaces, advertisements, signboards, and adornment. All of these are logged into a digital dictionary, map key, or chart called “Elements Menu.”
(b) Mapping in Language: journaling, writing, or mind-mapping information to identify, notice, or un-confuse the relationship between my memories, feelings, and conscious thoughts.
(c) Mapping in Space: exploring paint surfaces in positive and negative space such as edges, walls, floor, objects, impressions, reliefs, textiles, interiority, and exteriority.
Through mapping I create language to look into my inner self as a form of care, constructing a world full of stars, happiness, endless trails of hue, playful maps, and birthday cakes. My language exists in my mixed-media paintings as icons, images, patterns, reappearing symbols, thought-forms, colors, and shapes reinterpreted from real life.
These paintings are companions to each other and lifelong friends of mine. I work in oil with a mix of acrylic, gouache, graphite, oil pastels, and colored pencils, sometimes accompanied by sculptural elements like ceramic tiles, fabrics, birthday candles, googly plastic eyes, clay, confetti, beads, or leftover threads. I adorn and adore my paintings and all the materials that go on them. -2023
(a) Mapping as “Playing” includes activities such as the following: trailing, strolling, collaging, close-looking at design history embedded in everyday life, and collecting images of mass-produced, manufactured designs, icons, miniatures, menus, grid forms, parts of interior spaces, advertisements, signboards, and adornment. All of these are logged into a digital dictionary, map key, or chart called “Elements Menu.”
(b) Mapping in Language: journaling, writing, or mind-mapping information to identify, notice, or un-confuse the relationship between my memories, feelings, and conscious thoughts.
(c) Mapping in Space: exploring paint surfaces in positive and negative space such as edges, walls, floor, objects, impressions, reliefs, textiles, interiority, and exteriority.
Through mapping I create language to look into my inner self as a form of care, constructing a world full of stars, happiness, endless trails of hue, playful maps, and birthday cakes. My language exists in my mixed-media paintings as icons, images, patterns, reappearing symbols, thought-forms, colors, and shapes reinterpreted from real life.
These paintings are companions to each other and lifelong friends of mine. I work in oil with a mix of acrylic, gouache, graphite, oil pastels, and colored pencils, sometimes accompanied by sculptural elements like ceramic tiles, fabrics, birthday candles, googly plastic eyes, clay, confetti, beads, or leftover threads. I adorn and adore my paintings and all the materials that go on them. -2023