Artist Statement My paintings explore relationships between partners, parents and children, friends, people and nature. Traditional ideas about femininity and motherhood are questioned as women in this work bounce back and forth between getting it done and becoming undone. The figures are in motion, wild and oddly shaped with claw-like hands or nipples protruding through their clothes. These portrayals of what it feels like to be a woman contrast the ideals society places on us and the ways we have been portrayed in the past. I explore taboos and moments that make one want to cuss. Piles of bodies at work or play are bound up together. They support each other and crowd each other in landscape; the kind of landscape one sees outside the car window while driving out of town down the interstate. Over time my work has moved away from abstraction and toward figuration and narrative. Glazes, drips, sprays, veils, slashes, and daubs build up things like pine trees, transformers, flowers, grass, skulls, stars, crowns, underpants, and bodies with too many hands, feet, knees, and elbows. I use anxious mark making, exaggerated body language, and warped perspective to mirror a rushing world distorted by apprehension. These paintings underscore the inherent emotional conflict of parenting young children and the fragility of comfort and happiness in America today.