Having grown up on a farm, I remember playing in the woods and around the farm; trees became houses and the woods became a home; I became one of the animals roaming the fields. I am thinking about this when painting; a buffalo transforms into a human, embodied in an imagined environment and staring straight towards the viewer. The animal reveals an emotional uneasiness about what it’s like to be this creature.

These human-animal hybrid creatures inhabit unnatural and ghostly spaces and landscapes. I paint as a way of exploring the boundaries between what is human and what is non-human.  I use the physicality of the paint to create a surface that is like fleshy skin. The visceral nature of the work privileges the animal side of being human, allowing me to explore a bodily experience. I begin by collecting photographic sources of animal and human bodies. Through an improvisational process, my images depart from the photos, allowing surprises to occur in the forms and spaces that develop on the canvas.