Artist Statement My practice examines how attention is structured and how it might be redirected through drawing, working in relation to the histories of botanical illustration and the colonial systems of classification that shape how the natural world is perceived and ordered. In contrast to systems that demand speed and constant engagement, my work slows perception, allowing images to emerge gradually and remain unsettled.
Drawing is the primary method through which this takes place. It unfolds through sustained attention, where associations gather over time and begin to shift what first appears through observation. As the process continues, images move between recognition and invention, drawing in memory, reference, and speculation.
Many drawings begin from encounters in my immediate surroundings: a tree outside my studio window that I return to repeatedly, a damaged botanical plate whose taxonomic structure has begun to break down, or preserved specimens in museum collections that have outlived their original purpose. These materials are not reproduced directly. They circulate through my work, reappearing in altered configurations across multiple drawings.
Forms shift, double, and recombine, resisting stable identification and opening space for alternative relations between bodies, plants, and the structures that attempt to define them. Images are often held at a threshold—partially legible, slightly out of reach—where they cannot be fully resolved. This condition of distance and partial access runs throughout the work, unsettling traditions of botanical representation that depend on classification, legibility, and control.
Across the work, these images accumulate into a dispersed counter-archive. This is a shifting field where forms persist without stabilizing. Images remain in circulation, carrying traces of observation and transformation without resolving into a single state.
This process extends into sculptural and spatial structures that shape how the work is encountered. Objects are positioned in ways that suggest handling—lifted, turned, or examined—while remaining partially inaccessible. Contact is implied but not completed, producing a condition where proximity is negotiated rather than given.
The drawings can be understood as traces of this condition. They do not describe the objects directly, but register what contact might produce: forms that split, merge, or absorb one another, carrying the effects of proximity without settling into fixed identities.