Artist Statement

In the series A Drop in the Ocean, my large abstract paintings explore memory, presence, and loss.

A Drop in the Ocean began in 2024, while I was caring for my husband. A brilliant and funny former comparative literature academic, he died of an aggressive form of bladder cancer in 2025. His final, incomprehensible scribbles, made when he could no longer write, became my visual source material.

I began with intuitive, gestural acrylic, thinning the paint so compositions form and dissolve in continuous motion. Subsequent paintings incorporate medical language—wound, stoma, chemo, late—transcribed onto canvas laid across my studio floor in wax pastel.

Hours before he died, we watched The White Lotus. In the show, death is described as a drop of water rejoining the whole, a return rather than an ending. After his death, the paintings opened into luminous, oceanic fields layered with oil, wax pastel, and pigment stick. Chalkboard-like marks and erasures evoke his life as an academic. By reworking the surface, I let marks and gestures overlap and reappear, fading in and out of memory.

The paintings excavate what emerges from devastation.