ARTIST STATEMENT

"Pulling Taffy" 2008 Series of 4

Pen and Ink/Color Pencil/Cut Paper/Mixed Media

I absolutely adore this series. I created these images back in 2008, using paper as my primary medium. There is something so wonderful about working on each of these ladies and then extracting them from the page, causing them to become so delicate in your hand. These ladies are dangling from their own little room, cocoon-like, graceful and yet deeply dark in context. You can find beauty in even the darkest of moods.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I remember as a child reading the German Fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and being engrossed in such beautifully dark imagery. The imagery may be dark in nature, but it invokes a subtle beauty by the delicacy of the extracted images and the great care in which they are strung together.

Each finished piece is considered a storybook. Each page, each image is scored carefully with an exacto knife and assembled layer upon layer to depict one singular candy coated image. In some cases other mediums are introduced, such as textile cuttings and tracing paper to add some color texture and depth. Each finished piece can have up to twenty different layers to create a more inviting scene.

I call this twisted beauty, surreal-like dark images, intertwined with childlike notions of paper dolls and fairy tales.......