Embossed and Embedded
2017-2018, mixed media on paper
This series began when I found a plant called “bishop’s balls,” a kind of milkweed, at my local market. The plants were awkward and lovely with tall, thick stems and hairy balloon-like seed pods hanging from slender tendrils. In my studio the seed pods quickly began to change, opening into suggestive shapes and exploding into fluffy white tufts. To me these plants were delicately beautiful, humorously absurd, sensual and vulnerable.
I became interested in how each of these fairly uniform seed pods opens and changes shape in a unique way, based on the relationship between the seed pod’s original structure and external forces such as climate, lighting, and placement on the stem.
In this series individual seed pods are painted over deeply embossed, gold and black patterns. These layers create a tension over whether the image of the seedpod or the flat pattern will dominate, perhaps mirroring the process by which we all reshape and form ourselves throughout life, while never escaping our beginnings.