I am attracted to complexity and thinking about how a mass of details is formed into an artificial or natural order and want to tell stories structurally, using patterns and visual structures as language.The visual origins of this project came from my practice of plein air painting. Through painting outside on small panels, which could be combined in the studio, I investigated complexity and how something viewed is visually constructed. The same lessons you learn about giving materiality to something seen can inform an understanding of any kind of complexity.I decided to use Marie Antoinette as a subject, because of her relationship to a world, which was centered on beauty, but where she eventually became a victim to the envy of beauty. Her life and times are echoed in ours, where the privileges of beauty and peace are unavailable to so many. Our world still has pockets of beauty- and our position in relationship to them is uncertain.
