My paintings explore futurity within Indigenous abstraction, using traditional techniques of hierarchy, natural science, metaphysics, mapping, mark-making, ancestral knowledge, and dreamwork that draw relational connections to the animate body and the physical landscape. The paintings function like a collection of thoughts, representing skins of identity, the psycho-social fragmentation that occurs from experiences of grief, diaspora and cultural uprooting. I paint using contemporary Western abstraction through fluid acrylic paint pouring, marbling and colour mixing. I apply beads, string and drawn lines over the found patterns in the paintings to imagine my own landscape through playful, psychological investigations. Each painting beckons a task to map my inner world through simulated, psychometric Rorschach tests.
Talismans and Star Stories is a series of small scale paintings on 5”x 5” wooden panels which are artistic explorations in protective spell work. The intuitive and time consuming process of interpreting the physical or material qualities in each painting functions as a meditative act of accessing channeled information. Ritual acts of making summon automatic thoughts and reflections upon themes and patterns, including astrological events, plant and animal symbolism, cultural stories, parables, allegories or myth. Each painting is guided by this process, holding those specific energies within the object. Some paintings may include encoded information, colour therapy, stones, plant and animal fibers which hold meaning and talismanic qualities intended to attract certain strengths into oneself or one’s life
