Artist statement:

I am intrigued by the very specific details of stories in the Old Testament of the Bible and the literal and descriptive quality of its narratives. My work focuses on the innate human activities of pattern making and creation that help navigate the relationship between the inherited narrative and reality of our experience. The interplay of violence, lust, betrayal and revenge in the story of Samson creates space for both direct straightforward human emotion as well as the complex motivations that drive all actions.

I am particularly interested in the female characters and how their actions represent the full range of femininity, pointing to their identity through the use of pattern and gesture. I represent them all with a similar figure that plays out all of the roles of the women in the story. None of the range of the feminine characteristics is mutually exclusive and I imagine that all of them are manifested in some way in all of the women.

In the same manner that traditional altar paintings removed the environment from the figure, often including only a view out a window of a distant vista, I have taken the figure out of the environment to emphasize their disjuncture. I remove the figures from the traditional rectangular picture frame and place them in a timeless space-less environment, replacing the traditional gold-leafed otherworld of altar paintings with the ambiguous space of a white wall.