Encaustic Sculpture, Paintings & Drawings

Art runs in my lineage. My mother’s mother was a fashion designer in Poland. She never worked from patterns. Like her, I never followed construction rules. As a young child I would use whatever materials were around, drawing on rocks not on paper, in middle school fabricating colorful dimensional forms made from cast Barbie heads and plastic turn tables. My favorite things were never flat, so it made sense to become a sculpture major in graduate school using wire caging and ripped nylon among other materials, combining the conventional with unconventional. 

 

My early work was based on physical trauma, being a breast cancer survivor. Feeling hollowed out led to the development of visceral forms that when coiled from the inside, allowed beautiful structures to emerge, creating their own space and negating their own conventions. They reference letterforms such as cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and calligraphies. They are zigs and zags like x and Y-chromosomes, living organisms that together grow into a community of clustered shapes. Their proportions are body-like which occurs in lettering as a rule of thirds, like the letter E. They describe different sensibilities and are a new context for our political arena of language.

 

I am drawn to painting with encaustic for its versatility. It has magical abilities; being translucent, activated by heat, it can be cast, and can adhere to any surface while being able to embed things into it. It's a very process-driven medium, like cooking but better. Color is a driving force behind my work. Bright colors require different kinds of evocative thought. Fluorescents pop and illuminate light, enlivening the forms. I am pushing the limits of the materials I use to give an identity to my constructions.