Painter to Water, Skin to Coast

We exist in conversation with the water in our bodies, the rain that wets our faces and nourishes our crops, our neighbouring water bodies, and other beings, both human and non-human.

Artist Statement

This project explores water as a connective tissue between all beings. Through large-scale, semi-representational paintings of the Pacific Northwest’s marine ecosystems, I aim to reorient viewers’ perception of water. Using additive and subtractive methods of painting, such as staining, layering, impasto, and wiping with rags, I instill a sense of visual depth and ephemerality, while keeping a record of labour from the motions of water and the body. I draw upon the lens of hydrofeminism, as introduced by Feminist Environmental Humanities researcher Astrida Neimanis, which views water as a cultural, queer, and feminist archive that connects us all, from amniotic fluid to our drinking water. Unlike the typical blue hue connotation, my works explore water through saturated and warm colours, reminiscent of both the warmth of the body and the realities of ocean warming. Through this conceptual and material tension, I invite viewers to immerse themselves in texture, colour, and the relationship between painting, bodily rhythms, and climate justice. Inspired by artists such as Howardena Pindell and Genevieve Robertson, I embrace ambiguity in scale and subject matter, thus providing a space for viewers to tune into their own bodies when interacting with the works.

Artwork 1 (On View in The Show 2026 at the Libby Leshgold Gallery)

When Every Vein is Red out of the Blue (see fig. 2) is composed of various scrap canvas pieces sewn together (see fig. 3 and 4) as the basis of the layered and mobile large-scale painting. I intend to immerse the viewers in an underwater experience of engaging with the sheer height and gravitas of a bull kelp forest. Through layering multiple water-based paints and inks, this painting has a predominantly chromatic grey tone which is a nod to not only the pollution from industries that seep into the Salish Sea, but also the constant greywater generated by homes and other buildings, such as artists’ studios.

Artwork 2

Science journalist and author Alanna Mitchell expresses that life on land is dependent on the health and equilibrium of the ocean which covers more than seven tenths of the Earth’s surface (7, 10). Mitchell’s writing reminds us that we are far more connected to water than we are to land. Our “amniotic beginnings” are a “replica of the marine world”, so it is not far-fetched to say that we can, perhaps, learn a lot from our underwater kin (Neimanis 95; 22). Through the creation of this project, I seek to discover what water and rhythms in and out of our bodies can teach us, and how tactile painting can serve as a form of mediation for our fluid interconnectedness and amplification of climate action.

Artwork 3

The superimposed imagery of signs and a holdfast—the wire-like structure at the base of most macroalgae that serves as an anchor in the water—creates a “portal” into another world of understanding. I was initially inspired by the parking signage that was strewn across the pavement of a construction site near campus and toppled on top of one another, as there was an indescribable humour in their uselessness. With the addition of the floating holdfast, these signs are even more nonsensical. What purpose would they even serve underwater? I illustrate the holdfast as a way of untethering terrestrial notions of delineating space, thus introducing a speculative world where water, as Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson states, is an “anti-container” container (50-51). Many of our human-made structures and rules cannot thrive or even survive in water, so there is some personal respite in knowing that water is ever-flowing, transformative, and most times unknowable.

Thank you, water, for teaching me what it means to listen, care, slow down, and adapt.

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Works Cited

Betasamosake Simpson, Leanne. Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, Knopf Canada, 2025.

Mitchell, Alanna. Seasick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, Murdoch Books, 2010.

Neimanis, Astrida. “Hydrofeminisim: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.” Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2012, pp. 85-99.