2223 1st Avenue North: Lindsey Office Furnishings

BFA in Painting, Birmingham Southern College

Graphic Design, University of Alabama at Birmingham

I begin my mixed media paintings on wood by creating a grid of twine or string that covers my entire piece. This is the foundation for my painting - like the many systems and routines we use to build our lives. This starting point is comfortable, therapeutic and stable. I mold each piece into a series of thoughts and experiences inexpressible by words. At a certain point, I set the painting free by ripping away the string system. The grid no longer dictates the painting.

My materials consist of different patterned fabrics, string, acrylic paints, and images transferred onto fabric. When layering, sewing, ripping, and binding my materials, I focus on humanity and the secrets each of us hide behind. I experience and seek to expose life’s cycles of finding freedom amongst the secrets we seldom reveal, and the duality of being trapped by their power.

Each piece of the grid is a past memory, or a future event. Each fabric, color, string, and knot gives detail to that specific memory. The result of my mixed media painting is a series of experiences all viewed at once. Kurt Vonnegut describes the way I view these moments of time in his book Slaughterhouse-Five,

“There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages except that the author has chosen them carefully so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful, surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, and no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”