I started drawing these characters as doodles in my sketchbook, often appearing as bits and pieces of manufactured and biological information that formed as my eye wondered and fixated. Too anxious to let my eye stare at my subject for too long, I only had a limited amount of time to render fragments. Given more time redrawing my doodles these characters formed as something more permanent.

As formal portraiture they cut up and amalgamate the senses of the human form by taking something mundane and familiar and reconfiguring it into alien territory. I’ve found that, out of context these disparate parts become objectified and festishized allowing you want to look at what is uncomfortable to see, to tie a cute bow around the grotesque and to have ownership and accessibility to anomaly. Over time as I’ve grown to know these characters and the stories that help form them, the more they require individuality. I decorate and adorn them as playthings, whose toy like characteristics I reference as much as the body’s repulsive and often curiously playful topography.

The senses exist separately and commingle; skin forms a thin barrier just adjacent to interior and exterior cavities, quivering at varying degrees of stimuli. Moisture is foreign and familiar; temperatures fluctuate as touch introduces new textures and environments. Eyes dart from contour, to contour exhausting on saturated colors, fixating on discovering new worlds miniscule and vast upon deep exploration. Noses intake and categorize tiny bits and pieces as particles flood their passageways providing opportunity for categorical identification. Tongues consume pungent flavors and textures first alien…then common…then like, as digestion drinks matter down. Ears grasp on ebbs and flows of a sticky atmospheric geography. These separate entities reform to orient its beholder and ultimately know its exterior environment.

These characters explore the oddities of the human experience, in grown hairs and all. They collect gaps in understanding and reorient in order to create myth. They extend a hand that provides context in which our bodies experience and understand the world around us.