This ongoing series of collage illustrations investigates story-telling through visual autobiographical allegory. As opposed to chronology and specificity, I instead employ metaphor and parallelisms. Motifs, fantastical compositions, a playful palette, and a soft, thoughtful combination of materials work to create a personal narrative in fairytale form. And I hope, like any good fairytale, that amid the fantastic impossibilities the viewer or “reader” may re-imagine themselves in the tale.

“Dawn and the Sea” comes from a passage of the Bible that has often played a role in difficult seasons of my life. Like a lifeline, I have clung to it when desperate for a reminder that God is good and with me.

“If I take up the wings of dawn

Or dwell at the end of the sea

Even there You hand will lead me

Your right hand will hold onto me.”

(ESV)

I borrowed “Dawn and the Sea” as a framework for how to think of each illustration — no matter where I have gone, what state I’ve been in, what emotional, mental, spiritual condition — God has never left me. For this series, I worked intuitively, focusing on memories from my life in which I felt God’s nearness, His faithfulness in this way. Sometimes, a specific composition comes to mind already formed. Sometimes, I have to work to visually communicate through metaphor the moment in time that I’m thinking of. Other times, I simply have come across a childhood photograph and something clicks.

I work with a variety of material — found papers, fabrics, canvas, colored pencil, and graphite pencil — to push the fregmentary nature of the memories and the “pieced-togetherness” of my life. A subtly colorful palette, paired with muted natural textures such as fibers and speckled papers evoke on ethereal quality. In much of my work, I’m interested in exploring the visualization of the physical and the spiritual, and how these overlap and coexist. Here, I mix the realistic pencil renderings of the figure with impossibly proportioned objects, abstract landscapes, and patterns representing surfaces.

This series of illustrations will culminate in a limited edition of artist books. Each physical composition will be digitally reproduced, paired with text, printed, hardbound, and hand-finished. My hope is that the work can be enjoyed and experienced in dual forms — the individual collages in exhibition spaces and the books on the hands of readers.