Urban Garden
Artist Statement
This is the companion painting to my 2015 ceramic installation of the same name. As someone who works in a variety of media, I often explore the same concepts and imagery in several materials: clay, mixed-media quilts, textile prints, drawings, and paintings.
The inspiration for Urban Garden is my own garden and my love for, and addiction to, it. I bought my first house (which is in Kenosha) in 2009, and it provided me the space and freedom to build an artistic landscape through a dense garden of ornamentals. In my neighborhood, people know me as “the woman with all the flowers.”
Before being so engaged with my garden, my artwork mostly employed cityscape imagery, contemplating an idealized, playful vision of the city as the human home full of possibility, creativity, and freedom. This piece (and the ceramic version that holds the same name) shows how my subject matter of buildings start to morph into a more dominant foundation of stylized flowers shortly after I began gardening.