Work in review.

New journal, check. New pen, check. Work up on walls, check. Time to pull up the chair and get busy.

The beauty of writing an artist statement is the challenge it provides: taking a step back and looking at your own work objectively. You step into the role of a viewer and make observations, notice themes, and try to thread it all together into a cohesive thought. So far I've been switching between two different processes. The first one is just going through, piece by piece, and writing what I see. The second (happens coincidingly) is a mind map of high-level themes.

Honestly, the first process is a little boring. I try to make it fun by making the description feel like a narrative. I needed to take a nap after evaluating two pieces. I get more excited about the high-level themes. Below are some of the themes I've been thinking of:

Legacy, topography, order and chaos, control and unpredictability, intuition and precision, juxtaposition and cohesiveness . . .  

Legacy (human need to leave their mark) and topography (mapping the relationships of a landscape) have been at the forefront of my mind when looking at everything together and something that stands out from previous bodies of work.

I need to dig deeper into all of it but it's exciting to unearth what motivates me and discover what my work is truly trying to address. When I am working I just go - a lot of it is lead by intuition. I act like a composer and am more concerned with flow. Now it's time for me to act like an architect and evaluate structure and figure out why that flow works.