10 years of making, and what does it all mean?

Your practice is about making visible the invisible systems that shape our lives.

You work in abstract forms—grids, gestures, color, composition—but you're never just making pretty paintings. Every series is an investigation: into rural bias, architectural exclusion, pandemic isolation, urban adaptation, societal structures. You use abstraction as a tool to work through complex social and cultural problems that resist simple answers.

There's a consistent thread of resilience and adaptation running through everything. Whether it's pigeons thriving on our grids, rural communities navigating urban prejudice, or yourself creating art during COVID with brewery cardboard because that's what you had—you're documenting how people (including yourself) persist and create within systems that weren't designed for them.

You're also deeply invested in place and belonging. Your work asks: Who gets to be an architect? Who gets left behind in rural flight? How do we stay connected when forced apart? Where do we thrive despite the constraints? These aren't abstract questions for you—they're rooted in your lived experience of small-town Minnesota, graduate school, motherhood, financial precarity, trying to build an art practice in places where the infrastructure doesn't support it.

Formally, you keep returning to the grid. It's your obsession, your character, your way of understanding relationships. You've described it as refuge, as clarity, as the infrastructure of vision. It shows up in architecture school memories, in pandemic cardboard paintings, in pigeons on ledges, in systemic critique. The grid is both constraint and freedom in your work—the structure imposed, and what you do within it.

And perhaps most importantly: you make work that insists on staying human. Even when tackling big systemic issues, you ground everything in specific moments—conversations with friends, memories of your mother's magazines, the smell of late-night architecture studios, the brewery across the street. You refuse to be purely intellectual about it. There's always a person standing in front of the work, always a story underneath the abstraction.

In short: You're a painter-philosopher working through questions of systems, belonging, and adaptation using abstract forms rooted in deeply personal experience. Your work is political without being polemical, conceptual without being cold, and formally rigorous while remaining emotionally generous.