There’s a nearly invisible diagonal line that crosses England called The fosse way. If you type « Fosse » into Google maps, a series of red dots for various businesses pop up in a SW by NE line across the country. Establishments ranging from counseling services, schools, auto parts centers, parking lots, and even a prison bear the name of this ancient road. Zoomed in and with satellite view on, you can make out a nearly straight line connecting them. This Roman road established two thousand years ago has all but disappeared in its original form but its ghost remains in the modern landscape as parts of major highways, country lanes, walking trails, airport tarmacs, driveways, and sometimes just as a fence or a line of trees separating two properties.

This phenomenon could be called a palimpsest, but I don’t think that fully describes it. The idea of a palimpsest comes from the old practice of recycling valuable parchment by scraping off the top layer to make room for new texts, leaving traces of the old writing beneath. However, when the new text was added on top, its meaning and form was not influenced by the erased text, it simply shared the same substrate. Historical forms like the Fosse Way have a persistence; they direct bodies and shape landscapes over generations which adds a spiritual and psychological element. I believe that when we physically walk these paths or enter these spaces we’re communing with the dead – a collective unconscious guides us, and we can let go of individualistic illusions of control.

The paintings and murals that comprise this exhibition have rigid pathways through them that seem at times both arbitrary and planned. In one, a series of random blue objects align with a sliver of sky at the bottom of a window, in another, a grid reverberates through the architecture and design motifs of a room. This body of work is an opportunity to focus on something I’m constantly wondering in the studio: how much control do I really have, and how much are the images and forms in my mind dictated by well worn pathways that were laid down before me?

Each of the works in this exhibition is a reflection on various spaces and events from my past year: being pregnant for the second time, raising two small children, moving just outside of the city to a house with a yard, having a studio in my home, and curating our new environs to fit the aesthetics and values that we wish to pass on. While each painting has a logic of its own, I’ve extended lines, colors, and motifs from some of the works onto the gallery walls. This is the fourth solo exhibition I will have mounted in this room so its architecture is embedded in my brain. The murals that accompany the works are intended to bring these questions of history, control, and intergenerational patterns into the space of the room, and to acknowledge the years-long influence this space has had on my own path.