My installations, paintings, drawings projects speak to a warming planet, invasive plant and animal species, plastics, and rising tides and their effect on and transformation of our landscape and natural resources. To reflect this concept visually, some of the artworks’ subjects and surfaces are layered with cut forms that mimic coral, seaweed, and flora. There’s a physicality to the installation work in the way it juts forth from the wall, creating a metaphorical sound like the rapturous violence of giant waves crashing into a calving glacier. We are living in uncertain times — a growing ‘water world’ with more droughts and dwindling fresh drinking water, as our need for it arises. My work traverses the underbelly of the sublime and the future of an Earthly dystopia. My use of plastic materials, in both the installations and paintings, causes a paradox of thought. I’m repulsed by the proliferation of plastics in nearly everything we use and how it’s littered throughout the natural environment, yet I’m attracted to the smooth sexiness, ease of cutting, and the durability of working and painting on this material. My tiny-haired brushes glide along the surface, allowing the oil paint to leave delicate marks and lush statements. Most plastic has a short lifespan — one use and it’s discarded, may be recycled. My work offers plastic a long shelf life, thereby raising its hierarchy and value in the material world. It also becomes ambiguous: the way the paint sits on the surface, how it captures the light, and the transparency, calls to mind Old Master modes of painting, such as indirect, glazing, etc. With over 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean, the irony of a hand-painted, plastic ocean is not lost on me — a sleek, silky, glossy, human-made material is cut, painted, layered, and transformed into a contemporary, swirling waterscape, where beauty and darkness reside.