My painting focuses on process; a surface is established through a layering of materials and gestural mark making. The work evokes perceptions of self and hints at my undisclosed history.

As an artist and former counselor, I am concerned with the information revealed through the act of relationship - with the self, with others and with the world around us. I am interested in the processes of growth, change and personal perception - cycles of decay and renewal - deconstruction and reconstruction.

I choose to work with materials and methods that provoke the unconscious aspects of self to become visible. Through a layering of materials, mark making and erasure, a history is developed that speaks of need, curiosity, identity and compulsion. The resulting imagery is ambiguous and gestural in nature, exploring what is conscious, revealed to us, as well as what is subconscious or hidden from us. The marks are organic, referencing nature, always seemingly moving around something indescribable.

In my work I am exploring line in many different ways. The line is drawn with a variety of materials - charcoal, graphite, pastel or paint and then buried and revealed, over and over again. I have also chosen to create line by scratching and incising directly into the surface of the paint. This process of covering and uncovering directly relates to my concern with knowing myself - what I choose to disclose and what I keep hidden. The marks, like the disconnected or disowned parts of self, are always there, only obscured and buried by the layers of paint. Through this palimpsest of marks and transparent materials, I am speaking to what we can see through and what lies beneath in the deeper recesses of ourselves. The self presented to the world is often a veil for a more authentic self that we choose not to reveal.

This process based work is a response to my interest in the painting of the Abstract Expressionists like Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell and Robert Motherwell, who attempted to allow their internal processes and emotions to take form in paint. From very early on in my art education I have been engaged with the ideas of automatism and the exploration of what comes forward when I attempt to work from my subconscious - taking myself out of myself. This amalgamation of my interest in personal development with my art making has led me to explore the inner terrain of self in a new way and has left me responding to an internal restlessness.