Beautiful Terrible, 2024

The Beautiful Terrible project employs 18th Century, chintz textile patterns from India, which serve as a foil for my usual gestural landscapes. This work explores the ironic legacy of a popular colonial American fashion. An exponential proliferation of slavery and expulsion of indigenous peoples in the American South supported the cotton industry, which capitalized on the fashion of decorating with and wearing chintz. This is why the series is called “Beautiful Terrible”. It is fascinating that something so beautiful can have such dire consequences.

In the work, I rapidly cut canvas pieces and leave them in their resulting shapes. The irregular pieces refer to textile remnants I source from museum collections. I use these samples to create stencils and masks for the paintings. I fray the edges of each piece to further emphasize the substrate as fabric. The gestural, mostly unplanned landscapes, juxtaposed against styled designs of nature, represent our attempts to control nature and our footprint on the natural world.