Two Shadows That Flow Together, 2025, 28 x 38 x 1.5 inches unframed, acrylic, flashe, LDPE, oil pastel on canvas 

The Story Behind the Work

Two Shadows That Flow Together, named after a Pablo Neruda poem, features textures built up from layers of monoprinting with plastic bags (LDPE), underneath a layer of tinted Burnt Sienna and ultimately topped with oil pastel markings, taking lead from the chance markings made during the monoprinting process.

"Every print is a result of contact and release, which links it immediately to themes of touch, presence, and intimacy but also loss, separation, and memory."
– Jennifer L. Roberts, art historian, Harvard

We live in a time of overwhelming speed — digital immediacy, rapid production, and a barrage of news updates. Nature, in contrast, moves at its own pace. Glaciers form over centuries, forests regenerate over decades, and landscapes shift in ways that are imperceptible to us yet are made apparent over time. I feel the contrast in timescales between people and nature as I worked on this series in New York surrounded by skyscrapers, new shops popping up on my street, and social media updates while thinking about the inspiration for this series, the slow descent to the Torres del Paine granite peaks of Patagonia and the glaciers that formed them over millennia.

As Jennifer L. Roberts says in her six-part National Gallery of Art lecture series, printmaking is an intimate act of creation in which two foreign bodies rub up against each other with part of one of those bodies physically rubbing off onto the other.

I see this, the contact and release, the rubbing up and rubbing off, as a beautiful metaphor for our relationships, including our relationship with the natural environment. This is why I encorporate monoprinting in my paintings. We shape the environment through our fear and an urge to contain, control, ignore, damage, admire, revere, abuse, and preserve it, and it shapes us via the fragments of it we take with us in the forms of materials, photographs, sustenance, memories, ideologies, and beliefs.