I am a visual artist working primarily in encaustic, drawn to the medium's ability to hold tension between opacity and transparency, permanence and fragility. My creative path began in photography and digital art - mediums that taught me to see the world through light, texture, and form - but it's through encaustic that I've found my most intimate means of expression. Largely self-taught, I approach wax not only as a painter, but as someone deeply attuned to what lies beneath the surface.
For many years, my professional life was rooted in hospice and palliative care. I served as a nurse, educator, and CEO in end-of-life settings, where I bore daily witness to the complexities of grief, the quiet courage of families, and the sacredness of final moments. That work shaped my understanding of what it means to hold space - for sorrow, for transformation, for the stories we carry.
My family's personal history is marked by a deep connection to place, legacy, and loss. Over a number of decades, my grandmother's home evolved from the family's residence to a nursing home - layered with memory and care. More recently, the sudden and traumatic death of my brother introduced me to a form of grief that is unresolved and unresolvable. It has changed me, and in turn, it has changed my art.
The work I make now is not about representation or resolution, but about reverence. It's about honoring absence, exploring ambiguity, and creating visual language for what words cannot fully contain. In encaustic, I've found a medium that mirrors this emotional terrain. Its layers can obscure or reveal, preserve or destroy. It allows me to embed history into surface, to work slowly, meditatively, even ritualistically. My process is both intuitive and intentional - guided by a desire to give form to the intangible: memory, longing, and the echo of things left unsaid.
Art, for me, is not separate from life - it is a way of listening more deeply to it.