​Artist Statement

Every person builds a vocabulary of visual symbols that can be used to communicate in various ways. Children's symbols often reflect certain developmental stages and often represent actual beings/events/images. I am interested in combining my students' representational images with automatism. By breaking their drawings down into lines and shapes by random choosing, I attempt to find a balance of drawing without any rational control with an instinctive need to connect the shapes.

Intrigued by intuitive mark makings, I have collected drawings from elementary art students over the past several years. I notice almost a dance when a child begins a drawing, erases, adds, subtracts; back and forth until the end result.  What is left is the history of that drawing visible to the viewer. Observing these drawings makes me question, "What is intuitive and what is automatic?" and "Can the automatic become defined?"