I came back to painting five years ago after years of living a different kind of life. Retail management, motherhood, the daily rhythms of keeping everything running. When I returned to the studio it was not because I had something to say. It was because I had questions I could not answer any other way.

The questions turned out to be about the women in my family. My Nan, my Grama, my Mom. Women who ran businesses, raised families, and managed households, all at a time when the world had very clear ideas about women’s roles. They moved through it all as though it simply was. No announcement. No apology. And they shaped me completely before I had any idea it was happening.

I am still uncovering how. That is what the paintings are for. Not to arrive at an answer but to keep looking clearly at something that matters. Each time I collage together old family photographs, prepare a wood panel, and begin building up thin layers of oil paint, I am trying to see these women more fully. To understand what they carried and what they passed on without knowing they were passing it on.

The wood panels I paint on connect me to the place I come from. The geometric forms are the rules, made visible so you can begin to figure out how to move within them. The flowers stand in for the women themselves, each bloom a specific person, a specific life that exceeded what was expected of it.

My art is the story of a woman searching, observing, and still reconciling the different parts of herself.