Artist's Statement

It is difficult to appreciate the trials an artist must go through to explain her work in detail. Harder still is it to explain in a manner that sounds neither pompous nor boorish. I have laboured for three years on a statement. Changing it to sound more or less academic depending on how complicated my work seems to be at the moment. Throughout all of my work, as far back as I can tell, there runs a single thread of commonality: solitude. I say solitude rather than alienation because my work favours solitude in a manner that recollects walks as a child to intentionally find a place where I could not see another house. This solitude is not desolate or lonely but filled with life and curiosity. I have come to believe that the solitude in these paintings come from a very peculiar way of seeing the world to which many people who grow up in multicultural or first generation immigrant households are accustomed. We are filled with the tales of the old worlds and the hope and travails of whatever new world we have arrived. We move like ghosts through the world because we see, hear and understand what others do or cannot... we do not entirely fit into this culture yet, in our birthplaces, we are also exotic novelties. If one looks closely at my paintings, one will see the emotional solitude that is between old and new worlds and the silence that is there.

This sounds pretty fancy, but honestly, I try to disappear from the world when I paint. I suppose on one level or another, I've always wanted to disappear.