Known and Over-turn

Where the creative process harbors listening and response, I involve every element of my art making practice. For the last year and a half I have found an important and even necessary relationship between dance and painting. I found I could not truly understand or explore the content of my work without participating in both forms. Thus, I combined forms of dance and lyrical abstract painting to enter into moments of intentional engagement with points of reality, question, and petition. My body becomes like a brush pushing through paint that establishes form with movement and contact to surface of the floor and canvas. Movement with my body awakens the reality of my position in the room and relationship with myself and other things around and within me. As I carry paint onto the canvas the marks have a similar effect within the stage of the canvas that testify to the movement that established them. With each movement I seek to move in the rhythm of God’s heart that I seek and my own heart that seeks His face. I try to position myself to best hear more than speak that any visual word in movement and stroke would be the fruit of actual contact with truth and God’s presence.

An example of this listening process can be seen in an excerpt of my description from my "Over-turn" piece.

…Two marks that looked like marks of breath and opening became wings of song covering and victory…where in between something solid rests yet pours and like the Shepherd gathers marks of green and purple circling around stones laid. My body and the marks listen to the pouring, lifting, each other, and invisible forms that emerge in their dance look like stones. They are stones of the testimony of God’s faithfulness and/or perhaps the walls of Jerusalem.