ARTIST STATEMENT: For many years now I have been introducing new materials to my work, in the past it was coffee and whiskey and now I find myself working with diatomaceous earth on wood panels. I find that one material can activate a dialogue with another and can create certain tensions. My work is a philosophical inquiry; I use the language of abstraction, blending it with the pictorial and pastoral, to create hybrid, textural landscapes. Painting as a language presents itself as a game for me to dissect; it enables me to play within its delicate balance. As a painter I feel that I am a materialist, one that explores materials as an investigation into what painting is. Painting is a philosophical inquiry and it takes a great deal of time to understand one’s own personal language as well as developing a working relationship to one’s materials. I look at my installation work as re-presenting many “traditional” elements of painting. I build sculptural objects from a painter’s perspective and consider the installation space as a three dimensional interactive painting. Color is one such element I play on; the paint “layer” is another, and I fragment the ground and show them as layered and stratified. In other pieces I will juxtapose applied color with dyed color such as felt, and with reflected color such as metal against wood or paper. I am interested in stylistic contradictions and I like to keep my work alive and animated. I have always incorporated images from nature, working within a geometric framework. I tend to use landscape references in my work. My work plays within three and two-dimensional planes, thereby creating a theatrical situation and an active viewing space. There is a certain humor to the work, as I take pleasure from making visual puns. In my involvement in the playing with or punning on figure/ground relationships, I have used landscape as a metaphor for ground; rearranged -- a broken down grid that has become a composite of the real and the unreal. This reconstruction is when land escapes itself, to become something else.