I’m a painter working in collage. Motherhood changed the conditions of my studio practice. I needed a way of working that could accommodate interruption and shorter periods of concentrated attention, and I found my way back to collage.

I’ve always been compelled by history, both personal and collective. I studied anthropology, and I grew up with an awareness of absence and of the ways we construct a past from what remains. I’m drawn to museums and historic house museums, places where the past is kept, arranged, and made available to us, but never completely. I cut painted paper into shapes and rebuild what I find there: vases on pedestals, period rooms, vitrines, photographs.

I keep returning to the moment when a shape becomes an image without entirely giving up being a shape. A flat piece of painted paper can turn into a vessel, a doorway, a shadow, or a room. A figure cut from black paper can be a rider on the side of a vase. I want both readings to stay available, so the construction of the painting remains visible alongside the world it describes.

Collage lets me test these relationships with my hands. I can pick up a shape, turn it, cut it apart, or place it where it doesn’t quite belong. I think of this as a form of pretend. What I’m looking at gives me a set of facts, but I don’t have to obey them. Scale shifts, color departs from what I saw, and space is compressed or rebuilt incorrectly.

What I look at has usually reached me at a distance. I try to cross that distance through making. I need something specific to push against, but the painting begins when I let it change.