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My paintings are formal configurations of the landscape, contextualizing my childhood in Maine. My engagement with these natural surroundings allows me to reconnect with a former self and reinvent the landscape. My process involves visiting familiar sites during inclement weather and allowing the work to begin intuitively—by making marks with my hands or my feet, on the land itself or on an ice and snow covered windowpane, and etching clear spaces into the icy facade that expose the landscape beyond. This work is an incantation, a summoning of something internal that collides with the external in a natural way. I photograph these marks on site and then, back in my studio, I combine the photographs with other images that I have drawn on transitory surfaces such as a Buddha board (akin to water on a rock surface) or a child's Etch-a-sketch pad, before printing them out digitally. I often embed these images directly on and into paintings. The surface appears to be both flat and deep, much like translucent water and oftentimes reminiscent of an x-ray image. I am deeply interested in the ambiguity between the physical surface and the illusion of deep space. It speaks of the tenuous, fleeting hold we have on the world.
"…There is a gestural dimension to the work that suggests the movement of the body in space—the deep somatic memory that sears childhood experiences within adult consciousness. While still influenced by landscape and site, weather and other natural phenomena, and the forms and movements of the human body there is a new richly enigmatic and poetic dimension to the work."
— Patricia Phillips