The Tip of the Tongue:

My current body of work is an examination of memory which seeks to explore questions of what we remember, how we remember, and why we remember what we remember. Each piece is a recreation of an intimate yet fleeting moment in time often capturing figures in simple everyday actions. The act of remembering and the involuntary manifestation of forgetting appear side by side in my work. Each piece thus balances both the desire to preserve the memory in its entirety while simultaneously revealing the unreliability of the memory itself. My primary medium is encaustic as the material offers a uniquely resilient durability. Like fossils trapped in sediment or insects trapped in tree resin, my pieces contain personal moments trapped in the unchanging space of the wax. Once embedded, the viewer is offered a chance to peer through layers of history. The act of preservation within each piece becomes a moment of permanence in a world of impermanence. This is reflective of my own concerns of memory, time, and ultimately the mortality of the people, the moment, and the memory depicted. Currently my artmaking process involves the slow translation of a memory into related drawings before overlapping and encasing the drawn moments between layers of wax. Through the layering process, some marks appear closer to the surface while others recede. This push and pull reflects an honest inability to perfectly recall memories. Some details inevitably become lost in a haze of both the mind and the wax. Additionally, the layered images create a sense of motion as the memories take on a vivid life of their own within the isolated timeline of each piece. As a result, I am creating a visual and physical archive of “living” memories preserved within the unchanging space of the wax.