My artistic practice is an ongoing exploration of perception, materiality, movement, and the mysterious relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. I am interested in the idea that perception belongs both to the beholder and to the work itself: I present visual elements, but the viewer’s experiences, associations, and imagination participate in determining what becomes visible and meaningful. I seek to create work that activates this exchange rather than dictate a single interpretation.
In painting, I work with ink, watercolor, and handmade rice paper, sometimes extending the original image through digital filters. I am fascinated by the luminous qualities of ink and its capacity to respond to different rays of light. On the irregular, multilayered surface of rice paper, ink produces a complex interaction of gesture, texture, and transparency. Digital filters introduce another dimension to this process. Intersecting with brushstrokes, color, and organic forms, they generate new fields of movement, disrupting familiar patterns and revealing unexpected relationships. The resulting images invite multiple readings, hovering between abstraction, landscape, and recognizable forms.
My mostly figurative ceramic sculptures pursue a related investigation through the human form. I am drawn to the modernist expressionist movements of Europe, particularly their willingness to distort, simplify, and transform the figure in order to convey something beyond literal appearance. Falling in love with Amedeo Modigliani’s work at eighteen left a lasting impression on my artistic sensibility. I continue to explore how a contemporary sculptural language can emerge from the tension between recognizable human presence and expressive abstraction.
My intellectual life is inseparable from my artistic development. I am continually learning, expanding my technical skills, and questioning the assumptions through which we understand art and experience. Theodor W. Adorno and the tradition of critical social theory associated with the Frankfurt School remain important influences. Adorno’s attention to art’s resistance to fixed meanings and established conventions resonates with my interest in ambiguity, contradiction, and the limits of perception.
I am equally interested in Jungian thought and neuroscience, particularly their different approaches to the unconscious, imagination, and the emergence of images. I wonder how artistic gestures can arise before conscious intention fully understands them, and how viewers recognize patterns, faces, and forms within ambiguous visual fields. My developing interest in quantum mechanics and the physics of fields extends these questions toward the larger mysteries of matter, energy, and the cosmos. I approach these subjects as avenues of inquiry rather than scientific explanations of artistic experience.
Spiritually, Reform and Renewal Judaism and Ch’an Buddhism offer distinct but meaningful perspectives on presence, contemplation, and the relationship between the visible and invisible. Together with my philosophical interests, they encourage me to remain open to uncertainty and transformation.
Ultimately, I do not seek to resolve these questions through art. I seek to give them material form. Whether working with ink on paper or shaping clay, I approach making as a continuing process of discovery in which material, gesture, intuition, and perception participate in the emergence of something not entirely known in advance.
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