Water’s many material and geographic forms, powerfully represent movement, transition, flow, and change. The power and pull of water are due to its prominent place in the course of human history, shaping geographies and moving us across and between continents. Water also moves within us, giving us life as it has all life on Earth. And yet like the unpredictable and ever-changing nature of human experience, the course of flowing water is often uncertain and subject to change.

In this series, I often combine figurative traces of my immediate or recollected surroundings with abstract mark-making—for example in painting over digital collages or transferring them onto different surfaces. This layering of forms—and of aesthetic traditions, both Western and Eastern—is analogous to the layering of experiences that has characterized my travels, where objective reality is shaded by the subjective experience of it.

Creation and geographical movement are similar in that they can both disorient and offer direction. This is the paradox that motivates my work. The search is for what can hold an individual together as they move through uncertainty, as they respond—joyfully, if also reluctantly—to an urgency that might naturally draw them away from one home in search of another.