Artist Statement

My work focuses on the balance of communication between the mind and the body. I perform physical activities such as swimming, biking, running, and other repetitive exercises as a form of meditation that focuses on my body's awareness and healing. Finding a balance between how aware I am of my body is crucial. Body scan meditations signals to our minds that our body needs attention and a call to action. 

 

I create a reflection of my meditation practices through my art. Many of my paintings show a figure repeated multiple times at various stages of the exercise. Painting is a meditative experience, similar to my meditative exercises. Painting requires concentration, awareness, and trust in intuition. Through the painting process, I will repaint the figures multiple times until the painting reaches maturation. The texture in my paintings is the physical representation of numerous experiments with brush strokes, color, and form. I am a scientist exploring multiple hypotheses. Many of my figures have varying degrees of representation that change throughout the painting. The change of representation shows the mind's journey through meditation and awareness of the body and its surroundings. I use high saturation and expressive brush strokes to represent the mind and more muted colors with softer marks for the body's consciousness. In addition, I use X-rays of my spine within my work that records a body scan meditation. During a body scan meditation, I allow my mind to freely explore what my body is speaking to me, including the pain in my back and shoulders that are represented by color and abstracted form. 

 

In my meditation experiences, I begin by being fully conscious of how my body feels; as I progress through the movements, my mind tends to wander beyond my body. I lose track of time in these moments, slowly drawing my attention back to my body and deciding if I should continue. The cycle will repeat many times until the pain is gone or I feel it is enough. The experience of meditation opens the mind to creativity, as many artists have discovered. 

 

Learning to describe the meditation exercises, I looked to the Futurism movement as a stylistic guide. Looking at a painting from the Futurism movement, we can see the different stages of action and the path the figure follows through the composition. I create the repeated figure by recording my exercises and rewatching the film to find frames in the video that show different stages of the body in motion. The frames from the video are placed together in a sequential order that forms the narrative of the meditation

 

Through my artistic practice, I have deepened my exploration of the intricate dialogue between physical sensation and mental awareness. This body of work literally and metaphorically illuminates the transformative power of meditation through transparent papers, luminous color relationships and layered figures. By documenting these moments of mindful movement and translating them into compositions, I've developed a visual language that speaks to the ephemeral nature of physical awareness. Moving forward, my work investigates the societal pressures placed on women's bodies and minds within our communities, exploring how meditation can serve as both refuge and resistance.