Roots and Reverence
January 20 - March 2, 2026
Wildflower Playhouse Gallery
Taos, New Mexico
The paintings in the Roots and Reverence collection reflect my search for home—through memory, natural spaces and reclaimed devotional figures. Each painting is a meditation on belonging as a birthright, claimed or reclaimed. This inherent belonging brings with it comfort, resonance, and deep knowing. In creating this collection I explored themes of home, comfort, tradition, and fixed beliefs as well as adventure, ambiguity, mysticism, and the ways we find and create meaning. I am fascinated by how these opposing energies overlap, and how what we perceive depends on the lens we are looking through and how that lens, if we are willing, can be fluid.
BARN AND FARMHOUSE SERIES
The barn and farmhouse paintings pay homage to my two grandmothers, both deeply religious and traditional midwestern women. In their unique and creative ways, they brought warmth, beauty, comfort, and order to the bustling domestic worlds they lovingly tended. These works honor the quiet strength and care that shaped my earliest understanding of home.
LANDSCAPE SERIES
These tell a different story of home, of the small corners of the world where I have felt held as I have grown my deepest roots. By beautiful chance, this is the place where I landed to raise my children and build a life with my family, where my strongest sense of belonging has taken shape.
SACRED FEMININE
The paintings depicting images of sacred figures (The Blessed Mother, Mary Magdalene, and the two Venuses) celebrate the feminine and the rewards of curiosity and devotion. Raised and educated in the Catholic tradition, I left the church as a young adult when I was told there was no space for questioning or dissent. The spirit of the Blessed Mother is archetypal, transcendent, and cannot be contained within the limits of dogma. Her warmth and protection have remained with me, even as my connection to the doctrine and the assurances of my youth have fallen away.
The story of Mary Magdalene, revealed through her unburied gospel, has been an exhilarating revelation. Rather than the repentant prostitute I had been taught, she emerges as the primary disciple and partner of Jesus, perhaps one of the few who truly understood his message. Through her wisdom, I have begun finding my way back to lost parts of my own spiritual legacy.
