My work always starts with the personal. I make paintings that explore memory, identity, and inheritance: what we carry, what we hide, and what we pass on. Much of this comes from family life, especially the complicated relationships among women across generations. I revisit these relationships not to solve them, but to understand how they keep shaping me.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my work through the lens of reproductive labor. It’s a term from feminist theory that refers to all the work necessary to sustain life and relationships—caregiving, feeding people, managing emotions, and maintaining connection. It’s the kind of work that keeps things going, but often goes unnoticed.
When I look at my paintings through this lens, I start to see that care is not just the subject of the work—it’s also embedded in how the work is made. Many of my paintings are self-portraits, but they’re rarely about a single, stable identity. Instead, they hold multiple roles at once: daughter, mother, self. Figures are positioned in relation to one another—holding, watching, pressing in, pulling away. There’s often a sense of tension, of something unresolved.
The painting process shows this as well. I work in layers—some thin and drippy, others thick and opaque. I return to the same areas again and again, building up and scraping back. The surface is rarely resolved cleanly. It feels ongoing. In that way, painting begins to reflect the structure of care itself: repetitive, accumulative, never fully finished.
The objects I use—like the ham, the nesting hen dish, and the quilt—work in a similar way. These are things that, culturally, signal care. They’re tied to family, hospitality, and tradition. But in my work, they carry more complicated meanings. The ham, for example, is tied to gatherings meant to feel celebratory but often held implicit tension. The hen dish and quilt function as containers of memory—holding what was visible on the surface and what was kept underneath.
These objects point to how care is not just something we feel—it’s something we perform. It can be genuine, but it can also be pressured, expected, or contrived.
Outside of the studio, I’ve started to recognize this same kind of labor in my role at a cooperative grocery. Much of my work is relational: managing people, preserving trust, navigating conflict, and supporting small-scale food producers as they enter retail spaces. This work is ongoing and often invisible when it’s functioning well. It’s about keeping relationships intact and systems moving.
It’s also frequently undervalued. This kind of labor is often seen as emotional or secondary, rather than as a form of leadership. There’s an assumption that care and authority are at odds—that being attentive to people somehow makes you less effective. In practice, I’ve found the opposite to be true, but the perception persists.
What I’m beginning to understand is that the same kind of labor is operating across all of these spaces. In painting, in objects, and in my work at the co-op, there is a constant effort to hold things together—to sustain, to maintain, to respond, to return.
Care is not simply a feeling or a theme. It is a structure. It shapes how things are made, how relationships function, and how systems endure.
Making that visible—both in my work and in my thinking—feels like an important step.