Hope For Everything

In Hope for Everything, I integrate wooden shapes that for previous projects posed too many obstacles. Although these reclaimed pieces hadn’t easily cooperated with my earlier work, their strangeness interested me, so I kept them to the side, wondering if they would ever find a way into my art.

For me, the past year involved several personal and professional transitions. While these experiences were not negative, they were challenging, and they required me to accept limitations on what I could control, and to learn to adapt to what I could not. The pieces in Hope for Everything mirror my process of finding equilibrium during a period of change and uncertainty.

Like the difficult experiences I faced outside my studio, the strangely shaped reclaimed wood in Hope for Everything refused easy integration. I had to work with their incongruous forms, softening the edges, painting with bold, saturated colours, and using layers to bring an illusion of depth. I balanced working on these pieces with periodic returns to my traditional wood reliefs, finding in them a reprieve from the struggle of managing obstinate objects. Although my reliefs are complex structures, working with them felt familiar this time, a process that came with the kind of intuitive control learned from years of practice. Working with the reclaimed wooden objects, however, presented an entirely different artistic encounter. Just as my own life required me to face the realities of my circumstances, the process of working with the reclaimed wood insisted that I acknowledge powerlessness, and invited me to reframe those limitations as opportunities for new design. In this way, Hope for Everything reflects a process of acceptance and adaptation—an act of facing an unchangeable situation and, rather than turning away in fear or uncertainty, meeting the moment with curiosity and a willingness to grow.