In this body of work, I use shaped and sculptural canvas to investigate the tensions between presence and absence, through the lens of my experiences as a caregiver for people living with dementia.

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From Ellsworth Kelly to Elizabeth Murray, the geometric potential of shaped canvas has made it an excellent conduit for abstraction. I am interested in combining this potential with the relational psychology of portraiture and representational art to create works that explore perception, translation, and interaction.

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A major jumping off point for this work is my experience as a social companion for individuals with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Within assisted living and memory care environments, ordinary social structures begin to distort. Roles become slippery and difficult to define; meaning is assembled imperfectly, through traces and inference. Drawing from sociologist Georg Simmel’s conception of “the stranger” as the synthesis of near and far, the work examines how even closeness itself can contain forms of distance. Caregiving necessitates profound emotional and physical intimacy while simultaneously preserving ambiguity, particularly in relationships shaped by cognitive decline, where memory, language, and identity continually shift.

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​ Many of these works also incorporate recreations of abstract artworks I made collaboratively with my longtime elder-care client, Tim Connor, a man with primary progressive aphasia. These recreations function as acts of translation; a new size, medium, and context, they can never be perfectly faithful. Their distance from the original becomes part of the work, raising questions about what is retained, what is altered, and how meaning changes as verbal communication slowly breaks down.

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I am drawn to the stranger as a figure who exists within a social group while remaining, in some essential way, outside of it. I am interested in this tension as a condition of looking and of being looked at. How do we construct an understanding of someone through partial information? How can intimacy coexist with distance? And how do elements of unfamiliarity impact our relationships with those closest to us, or even past versions of ourselves?​