Of Leaves as Tongues, Installation Views

Exhibition at Boundary, Chicago, IL

In these paintings, accordion books, and arrangements of cut paper objects, leaf-as-letterforms emerge, unfold, and proliferate. Shape, color, structure, and space becomes the grammar, syntax, and speech of an unknowable intelligence. Materials embed and reveal this plant text in relation to physical surface and illusionary depth. These layered, stratified spaces are both open and unreadable.

Plants are communicative; they render language within environment.

My endeavor to read, write, and paint with them comes out of a long-held desire to explore their omnipresence and alterity though my work. Plants are kin and stranger. When I encounter them, I know and don’t know them; my intimacy with their particular forms and bodies is held in relation to their alienness.