SERIES: "Dropped into an Extroverted World"

These paintings come from the tension between an inner life and an outer demand.

Over the last several years, I have been making work rooted in childhood memory and the desire to reconnect with the child within. This series continues that exploration by reframing the things spoken and unspoken — the messages absorbed as truth about who I was, how I was expected to behave, and where I belonged in the world.

I was an introverted child in a family and society that valued a more extroverted way of moving through the world — joining in, making friends, belonging to groups, being popular, and fitting into the right social circles. Over time, those expectations became a kind of shaping force. Some parts adapt. Some parts go quiet.

The black and white under painting recalls the photographs and films of my childhood — the visual record of a time that now feels both familiar and unreachable. I make these paintings without brushes, working only with my hands, paint, and a chunk of graphite. The process is direct and physical: building, obscuring, scraping, and uncovering. The paintings hold traces of erasure and insistence, softness and abrasion, silence and movement.

This series is a return — not to childhood exactly, but to the self that existed before it learned to perform. It is about the slow recognition that introversion is not absence, failure, or fear. It is another way of knowing, another way of being present, another way of occupying the world.