I am a painter, most days. My compositions layer appropriated historical photographs with decorative patterns, scrapbooking what I refer to, somewhat self-deprecatingly, as unrigorous research with domestic visual culture. This collage-like structure mirrors the scraps of women’s internal lives recorded in visual and written archives. It also reflects an understanding of history as fractured, nonlinear, and echoing.
The patterns I use are pulled from a personal archive of my own homes, Hungarian architecture and textiles, and imagery connected to the women whose stories I follow. These era-specific patterns evoke decor and design, the unseen labor of home-making. They often envelop or intrude on figures, hinting at a life that continues at home, one that never made it into the official record, one that sometimes exists within and sometimes beyond systems of state control.
Many of my paintings begin with the story of a lesser-known woman’s resistance to state abuse perpetrated through medical, judicial, or labor systems. I follow this thread outward, finding repeating patterns in seemingly disparate stories across time. I’m drawn to the friction between violence and decoration—to how injustice coexists with a nice floral print in our everyday lives and environments. I’m curious about how beauty can serve us, about the possibility that the visual joy of bright color and rhythmic pattern might allow the content to slip surreptitiously past, radicalizing the living room.