Arroscia Residency
September - October 2025
My work engages with ideas of absence, erasure, and longing. Through painting and drawing, I examine the dissolution of memory and the boundary between the seen and unseen.
During my residency, I created a series of large-scale charcoal drawings and oil paintings on paper. Each piece depicts the absence of the figure. I paint remembered scenes— some too painful to recall, and others too beautiful to forget. Working from my collection of personal photographs in combination with images of the Ligurian landscape, I render people and places in great detail. I then obscure the images through reductive processes: sanding down the surface, and veiling with thin washes of paint. The images that remain become meditations on impermanence, as figures emerge and simultaneously disappear. Each piece becomes a precious way of holding something fleeting.
Metaphor is an important component of my work, particularly in the way objects and animals interact with the fading figures. The symbolism of arrows, thorny bramble, snakes, and piles of stones serve as visual representations of my mental state and emotional landscape. While I have formed personal associations with these symbols, I intentionally leave them open to interpretation, allowing meaning to emerge through each viewer’s individual association and experience.
Though distinct in execution—the paintings loose and expressive, the drawings more detailed and meticulous—both express the slow erosion of form into formlessness. My hope is that the series creates space for interior reflection, and an invitation to linger in the unknown.
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Located in the enchanting Ligurian Alps, the Arroscia Residency is dedicated to supporting emerging and mid-career contemporary artists through time, space, and community engagement
