The summer of 2023 was intensely hot, with sudden drenching storms blowing in and thick smoke from northern wildfires blanketing the air for days on end. My studio practice was driven by a submission to these elements, resulting in a series of large, quick paintings of tornado-like loops. These forms had been present in my work in the mid-2000s, as a symbol of my mother who passed away in 2005, and now re-emerged while my own children were away at camp - a brief pause in my responsibilities of motherhood. These tornado shapes - squiggly swoops with dangling legs - have taken on many new forms to me as this body of work progresses, and their meanings evolve as time goes by; some now appear as whirlpools or black holes, gaping mouths and (with yet another war in the newsfeeds) I also see bombs or the craters they leave behind.
At the end of 2019, I began a series of large-scale landscape paintings, which developed alongside my abstract works for the duration of the Covid pandemic. Originally inspired by the new She-Ra cartoons and some Hockney paintings of the American West, these landscapes have since evolved into post-apocalyptic spaces rife with pandemic anxieties, ecological devastation and the complexities of marriage and childrearing under lockdown.
