After Eagle Drawings: Ink Drawings

Artist Statement

My work—in the form of paintings, drawings, and site-specific installations—stems from patterns and traces of growth and decay in the natural world and the built-environment. I grew up seeing electron micrographs and lab specimens, and I am still engrossed by abstracted images of nature. In my works, masses of lines evoke various influences: organic forms such as hair, muscles, and fungi; natural systems such as waves and wind currents; geological strata; and topographical maps. These linear networks are often based on hand-drawn records of physical effects of nature in my immediate surroundings—like a bent plane around a window, a sloping floor, or the decaying walls in my former studio. My process includes making tracings and rubbings of surfaces such as plywood and cracking plaster, and I think of these marks as the calligraphic signatures of quotidian natural effects. I am invested in the hand-drawn line for its conveyance of individualism, imperfection, and frailty, and I see my use of line as a tenuous analogy to traditional Asian ink painting. I consider my works some personal interpretations of the material evidence of time, and I strive to delineate the emotional resonance of forms made by natural forces. These drawings are part of a series based on tracings and rubbings of the decaying plaster walls in my previous studio building, which will be demolished for the development of new condominiums.