Tarble Arts Center

Updates

​In 2014, my wife (Connie Richards Aigner) and I moved from Gunnison, CO, to Washington state where I accepted a full-time position at Pierce College in Puyallup, WA. I am a tenured professor here now and current Chair of the Art Department. I am enjoying teaching at this community college in a range of studio and lecture courses (2D Design, Beginning Drawing, Beginning Painting, Intermediate/Advanced Drawing and Painting, an Audio/Video/Performance course, Art Appreciation, and Contemporary Art History), in a very healthy and growing Art Department. I still maintain a studio practice (sporadic, but very much alive) and my work can be found at www.scottaigner.com. Separate from this, I worked for a film festival for 10 years as the Director of Screening and have moved on to doing Jury Selection work for some other smaller film festivals. I am also current co-host of an academic-style, deep-dive, film podcast with my good friend Jack Hanley (Blindspotting: A Film Discovery Podcast) where we are currently working on securing public lectures, speaking engagements, and educational gigs related to film analysis.

Excited to be a part of this exhibition—EIU is a place we both hold very deep in our hearts and truly valued our time and experience there.

Artist Statement

Movies. Cinema. Film. Motion Pictures. Fame. Celebrity. Nostalgia. These concepts lead the direction of my current studio work, which is a response to my love of movies and movie watching. Through my practice, I want to investigate the intensity of the movie watching experience and explore the affection one can have for a movie and the inter- and extratextual relationships of movies. At times, I feel that I am reinterpreting, reevaluating, and reinventing the very things that I hold dear to myself as an art process. I consider myself not only a consumer, watcher, recipient, and victim [of mass media and pop culture], but also an agent of that culture. I am interested in the role that I play in this cultural landscape and ideas of hyperreality (the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy). I am interested in how powerful nostalgia for something can be. I am interested in challenging the notion that watching movies is only a leisurely activity.

Through my work, I aim to share my collective experiences with my viewers—to point them toward the passion that I have for the close examination of this slice of pop culture. By treating film AS nostalgia, the experience of being a film lover can be filtered through whatever feeling or emotion evokes the personal pleasure of a happy memory.

Updates

I’m living and working in Chicago, IL, creating new work from my home studio as a freelance artist. 

Artist Statement

Antonio J. Ainscough, a Chicago-based artist, specializes in pop surrealist painting, drawing inspiration from themes of mood, identity, and self-exploration intertwined with cartoon aesthetics. His artwork delves into autobiographical and often exaggerated scenarios, providing a lens through which to examine various aspects of the human experience. Ainscough employs a distinctive style characterized by a harmonious blend of controlled disorder, which both pays homage to and challenges artistic conventions such as grotesque, impressionism, expressionism, and surrealism.

Initially drawn to animation as a career path, Ainscough redirected his focus to painting during his studies at Eastern Illinois University, where he received guidance from mentor Chris Kahler. Graduating in 2020 with a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts, specializing in painting, Ainscough has since showcased his talent through numerous solo and group exhibitions both nationally and internationally.

Updates

I’m currently employed at University of Notre Dame, IN, as a teaching scholar. I teach foundry class and also technician wood and metal shop.

Artist Statement

Exploring Socio-Cultural Heritage: An Artist's Journey

In my artistic practice, I am profoundly fascinated by the diverse cultures of the West African continent. Each community, tradition, and historical artifact embodies a story waiting to be uncovered. Through my work, I embark on a journey of discovery, delving into the socio-cultural heritage of West Africa and exploring the hidden gems of history that lie beneath the surface.

My current project reflects this exploration, as I research the intricate web of ethnicities that weave through the continent. I aim to illuminate the diverse array of historical items that have shaped West African societies. From ancient artifacts to traditional crafts, each object serves as a window into the past, a gateway to understanding the complex interplay of culture, tradition, and identity. This project is also a mixed-media endeavor that integrates traditional and contemporary processes. I utilize a variety of materials and techniques, including cast iron, aluminum, bronze, wood carving, stone carving, leather masks, welding and fabrication, plaster, 3D printing, intaglio, and weaving.

However, my work goes beyond mere documentation. It serves as a call to action and an invitation to engage in dialogue about the profound impact these historical items have on society. By presenting these artifacts in a contemporary context, I aim to spark conversations about their significance, meaning, and enduring relevance in today’s world. Through exhibitions, installations, and public interventions, I strive to create spaces where people can come together to reflect, learn, and celebrate the richness of West African culture.

This journey is deeply personal for me. It reflects my own cultural roots and underscores the importance of heritage and tradition in shaping our identities. As an artist, I feel it is both my privilege and responsibility to share these stories with the world to give voice to those who have long been silenced and to celebrate the beauty and diversity of West African culture.

In each artwork, I endeavor to capture the essence of my heritage, honor the legacy of those who came before me, and inspire future generations to embrace their own cultural identities. Ultimately, through understanding, appreciation, and respect for our differences, we can truly come together as a global community.

Artist Statement

I seek to reclaim the narrative surrounding the female body, which is often objectified and sexualized, by highlighting its inherent beauty and strength. Through abstract backgrounds that serve as metaphorical landscapes, I aim to reflect the complexity of women’s lived experiences. These vibrant, fluid forms symbolize the emotional and psychological layers that often accompany female identity, representing both the chaos and the beauty of navigating a world that frequently seeks to define women in narrow terms.

Updates

Since graduating, I've worked as a jeweler as well as taught jewelry at a few different schools and workshop centers. Currently I'm a jeweler in Geneva, IL, and I teach jewelry at the College of DuPage. 

Artist Statement

My work shows the dualities of protection and restraint and how these things relate to a desire to shed restrictions. A sense of vulnerability lies at the center of this protection and is shown to often be something that is obscured or unavailable. These pieces highlight the idea of struggling to move beyond behaviors and tendencies that are no longer useful and have instead become a hindrance to growth. The materials I incorporate become integral to the work because of their relationship to these concepts and each other. Thinly networked glass indicates a personal fragility when combined with objects typically worn on the body, while my wood carved forms I view as being in an active process of reaching and growing outwardly.

Updates

I am now an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL, teaching 2D Materials & Concepts, Illustration and Drawing I while keeping an active studio practice in photography, video, and game-based installation. I am grateful for EIU’s foundation and happy to stay connected.

Artist Statement

The videos I am showing in this exhibition focus on themes of memory, culture, and how technology shapes the way we see the world. I use moving images, animation, and sound to explore my experiences growing up in Ghana and navigating life in new places. My work often looks at migration, identity, and how everyday objects or spaces can hold deeper meaning.

Coming back to Eastern Illinois University, where I spent an important part of my journey as an artist feels special. This show is a chance to reflect on where I started and how far I have come while also honoring the people, ideas, and questions that continue to guide my work. 

Updates

I am currently in my second year of the MFA program at Arizona State University and preparing for my midterm candidacy review on November 14. 

Artist Statement

As a contemporary sculptor from Ghana, I create sculptures that evoke strong emotions using metal and wood. 

With meticulous attention to detail and through the intricate process of carving and welding, I create these sculptures by merging both materials successively. Armed with tools like chainsaws, angle grinders, chisels, and gouges, I carefully cut and chip away at blocks of wood systematically revealing the essence of my sculptural vision. I further extend my artistic expression by crafting sculptural items such as locks, cage-like structures, and lanterns, while also incorporating Ghanaian traditional beads into body adornments. I utilize a combination of graphite mixed with shellac and fuel to finish certain sections of my sculpture pieces. For other parts, I employ tung oil, walnut ink, and black paint.  

My work often draws from my personal experiences, identity, and African heritage. I invite my audience to also reflect on their own experiences, fostering a shared exploration of culture, memory, and self-discovery. Through my art, I aim to create a space for dialogue, connection, and introspection, encouraging viewers to engage with themes of belonging, resilience, and the richness of diverse narratives.

Updates

Dan Bainbridge (b. 1976, Dubuque, IA) is a New York-based artist whose work spans sculpture, collage, assemblage, and performance. His interactive installations often incorporate sound, movement, and handmade instruments to explore ritual, chaos, and transformation. Bainbridge has exhibited widely in New York, including solo shows at Silas Von Morisse Gallery and group exhibitions at Safe Gallery, Peninsula, and Queens College Art Center. His work has been featured in Maake Magazine, Artsy Editorial, and Brooklyn Magazine.

danielbainbridge.com

Artist Statement

Bainbridge’s interdisciplinary practice culminates in this exhibition featuring sculptural works that are interactive and meant to be played with. Stroke and pluck the mother unitars with their primitive single strings attached to their animal amplifier offspring by electrical umbilical cords. A vibrational birthing, producing, emitting, reverberating. Overhead, tiny, kinetic flies orbit and buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz to the point of delirium. Everything in the universe is vibrating and these artworks become one by joining in. One of the sutras of the Aquarian Age says, "Vibrate the cosmos and the cosmos shall clear the path." Clearing the path could be a mystical parting of the clouds— but it could also be an avalanche, a lava flow, a tidal wave, an earthquake. The pink bird amp, the rotisserie pig drum, the undulating whale, these musical sculptures set the stage for a potential performance. The bugs are the audience, the observers, bearing witness to the chaos and conjuring.

Updates

It hasn't been long since graduation for me, hahaha, but I'm currently living in Moscow, ID. I'm a first year student in the University of Idaho MFA program. I also teach two classes Integrated Design Process and Introduction to Art. I have my own studio space, and I exhibited work last week at Washington State University in a collaborative show with their MFA candidates. 

Artist Statement

My work takes an interdisciplinary approach to themes of nostalgia, grief, memory, and the personal history of objects as talismans. I’m influenced by the items I’ve collected in antique malls, blueprint drawings, ebay listings, internet culture, and rural churches.

I graduated from EIU in May 2025 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and am currently an instructor and MFA candidate at the University of Idaho in Moscow, ID.

Updates

Kofi Bazzell-Smith is an artist and educator, and the first professor of manga practice in the United States. His creative work spans manga, immersive exhibition, and multimedia storytelling, with a focus on speculative worlds, global exchange, and narrative experimentation.

A 2025-26 United States-Japan Foundation Leadership delegate, he serves on the board of the US-Japan Bridging Foundation, a scholarship organization supporting American students studying abroad in Japan. 

He is currently developing new programs in Japan to help U.S. students learn manga and Japanese language through immersive cultural exchange. Kofi's work is rooted in building bridges across art, language, and education.

Outside of the classroom and studio, He has been boxing for 16 years and turned professional in 2021.

Artist Statement

I create Black narratives in a Japanese medium. As a mangaka, my work explores how art can be a site of cultural exchange, imagination, and new knowledge. Trained in Japan and fluent in the language, I approach manga not as a borrowed style but as a rigorous practice—one I engage with through bilingual storytelling, worldbuilding, and interdisciplinary research. By working across languages, platforms, and traditions, I aim to expand what manga can be, and who it can be for.

Radius is a speculative manga, and immersive exhibition set 200 years in the future, in a world where Black life has been erased and only its aesthetic remains—replicated in the bodies of humanoid robots who fight for entertainment. At the center is Samir, a boy robot with the rare ability to dream. Drawing from my experience as a professional boxer and research in physics, the project blends manga pages, large-scale illustrations, AI chatbots, worldbuilding text, and scientific diagrams to explore spectacle, memory, and the politics of erasure.

Azuki takes a more whimsical tone. It’s a martial arts parody set in a world where Rock-Paper-Scissors is considered a serious combat discipline. The story follows a fearless young girl as she advances through a tournament of theatrical opponents and illogical outcomes. Drawing from my background as a martial artist, the project explores combat theory through exaggerated form and absurd visual spectacle. 

Updates

I am currently a stay at home mom of three beautiful girls, but in my spare time I make and sell custom woven projects. I have also had the opportunity to have some pieces auctioned off for a few non-profit organizations. Outside of that I have had a few art exhibits, and I am scheduled to have another this coming March at the Galesburg Civic Arts Center.

Artist Statement

Driven by a passion for color and texture, I create textiles that celebrate the beauty of the woven form. My work is an exploration of the interplay between vibrant hues and tactile surfaces, carefully designed to evoke a sense of visual and sensory delight. Each piece is a labor of love, meticulously crafted to enhance its aesthetic appeal and invite viewers to experience the joy of harmonious design in every day items.

Artist Statement

I've always been drawn to geometric figures and visual repetition. Since discovering fused glass, I have found it to be the best medium for expressing my love of pattern while creating unique works that I find challenging. I enjoy the process; the step by step progression of building a work of art. Fused glass fulfills this need.

My background is in ceramic tilework. I received my MA at Eastern Illinois University in 2000 with the study and creation of a large tile installation. At the time I was dealing with issues of preciousness. I found multiples not only my preferred design component, but comforting. If something blew up in the kiln I always had more.

For a number of reasons I began experimenting with fused glass in 2008. The transition was rapid. The precision of construction, the necessary experimentation, and the amazing range of techniques sucked me in. I found it curious that I would find a medium seemingly so fragile, so appealing. In my case the rate of failure is much higher when working with glass than in clay, but I’ve found the results more satisfying.

My current work still explores visual repetition. As my work matures I imagine the patterns will remain in one form or another, but I look forward to expanding that definition; finding rhythm in the less obvious. There is more work to be done, more skills to master, more glass to break, and more fingers to bleed.

Updates

I am an Associate Professor of Art at Midwestern State University, located in Wichita Falls, TX, teaching painting and drawing since 2017. I am a board member for the Texas Association of Schools of Art, 2018-present. Previous teaching experience was at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville 2007-2017, where I also received my MFA after graduating Eastern Illinois University. Outside of teaching, I am active in solo and group shows regionally and nationally.

Artist Statement

In 1952, Galaxy magazine published an article titled “Heinlein’s Predictions” by noted sciencefiction writer, Robert Heinlein. Detailed within this article, and others like it, were new technologies, ways of living, and political actions predicted to take place in the 50 years following. Of those listed, some spoke of hope, stability of life, luxury, new forms of travel and communication. Others, however, were more critical as a possible outcome: nuclear annihilation, lack of resources, and fear of the unknown. While some of these events did take place, others did not. My current work is influenced by both sets of possible futures: the hopeful and the cautionary.

We exist within that future timeline as predicted by the early 20th century. While very few of these predictions took place directly, they set into public awareness both the dangers and positive innovations that were becoming possible during the atomic age. The hope of clean energy, security, and ability to travel to new worlds was coupled with a sense of fear through political tensions, death from an unseen attack, and lacking the ability to control our own creations.

I am interested in portraying these fantastic events alongside everyday household items that act as symbolic tokens, serving as access points to the intangible. I use several layers of oil paint in traditional methods of glazing, building at times over 75 thin layers of color to achieve both flat color and deeper realistic passages within the work. This traditional technique, apart from rendering color and space to a particular level, also challenges my observed process as I am required to look more deeply at various objects and imagery than the passing glance I might achieve otherwise. In turn, the act of making art using a slow methodical approach is in contrast to the subject matter itself that speaks of forward progress, multi-tasking, and mechanical processes.

Through painting elements that are both real and unreal, I am engaged in the painting's ability to stimulate not just the sense of sight but also that of touch. Objects, along with their shadows, are rendered through trompe l'oeil sensibilities. These objects in their depiction further flatten out the space of the painting surface with otherwise deep space turning shallow. Various elements influenced by digital art, penny arcade pinball machines, video games, and religious altarpieces combine in compositions that straddle lines between the stable and the instable, the real and unreal, our grounded plane of existence and the fantastic.

Updates

So, after graduating, I tried to find a job in Rockford, but didn’t have any luck, so said screw the professional 9-5 job search and began freelancing graphic design and have been doing that ever since.

I got connected with a packaging company early on and started freelance designing pizza boxes for them and other packaging projects for several years. Actually, my daughter Sophie, who’s in the art program at Eastern now, was probably sitting in my office in a baby seat watching Baby Einstein cartoons or napping while I was designing the pizza boxes that are going to be in the show. The pizza boxes were just one part of my work at that time. I also did a lot of design work for financial advisors, non-profits, and a variety of small businesses doing all sorts of different projects. I went on to have four more kids with my wife and was able to work from home and be a present dad while they all grew up, which was probably my biggest accomplishment.

I still do graphic design now and have been independently working my entire career. The majority of my design work is still for the financial industry, but I also do work for different YPO clubs (Young Presidents’ Organization) and other areas such as a local dive bar, law office, trades organizations, religious, special city projects, non-profits, small businesses, and many other random projects. I mainly do print design and have also worked with a really good friend of mine, Jonathan Donaldson, whom I graduated with, that has helped me with freelance work when it gets too busy for just myself.

That's my last 20+ years in a few sentences… I’m sure I left out a thing or two, but generally, the freelance design thing has worked out pretty well over the years. It’s funny to think both Jonathan and I have 10 kids between us and worked on many, many projects together with kids crying and yelling in the background for many years. And now the oldest are in their 20s. It goes quick!

Artist Statement

I'm drawn to the quiet power of balance, but also to the energy within imperfection—the crooked line, the strange color, the beauty of something just out of place. My work lives in the space between control and curiosity, where design gives emotion a structure.

Updates

I am currently adjuncting at two different community colleges, Elgin Community College and the College of DuPage. I'm teaching Jewelry and Metalsmithing and a 3D Foundations class.

Artist Statement

I believe that loneliness is often a deeply private and personal experience that many people can relate to, whether that feeling is for a short period of time or over the course of several years. In this body of work, I examine the feeling of loneliness by exploring forms found in architectural and industrial structures. Each piece reflects how I felt at the time of making them.

I aim to capture moments of introspection and solitude in the connections we form with others. Through my own experiences, I sometimes have felt a disconnect with a community I was a part of, not knowing how to engage. I felt stuck and alone in these situations, not understanding how to interact or change the outcome. I reflect on those moments often while I am creating. There is a feeling of being unsure around most people, but there is also reassurance from being with the people I am closest to. I find comfort in knowing I will always have a strong bond with them, even if we are apart.

My inspiration for the forms of these objects comes from what I find interesting throughout my daily life. I am fascinated with manmade structures and their functions. Buildings are permanent structures meant to last and bring people together in a space. They are even a product of community or group efforts, yet they can feel so secluded from the rest of the world.

From the loneliness that can arise when we feel disconnected from others to the joy and connection that comes with deep, meaningful relationships, my work evokes a range of emotions and experiences. Overall, this work provides a space for reflection and contemplation.

Updates

I have a studio space in the 12Points neighborhood in Terre Haute. I help manage the space as well— trying to foster some creative community like we had back in grad school with studio spaces next to one another. In my time since grad school I have become a multidisciplinary artist. Maybe it’s also a bit of artist ADHD but I love too many mediums. Painting is still my main love (Acrylic lately but watercolor is a close second). I sell my originals and art prints on my website and sell them wholesale and on consignment in several local stores. Murals have been taking off lately which is not exactly a medium I thought I would break into but alas, I have painted them on a restaurant, apartment complexes' doors, an antique store front, and recently on a youth center exterior. I have shown my paintings in many local exhibitions around the Wabash Valley also. 

The latest venture in my work is that I am taking a course to become certified in surface design. It feels like a nature overlap with some of my pattern based art leanings, and I have enjoyed going back to a learning posture. 

I also have one main job that occupies nearly half of my life and that is as a Creative Director for our local high schools musical theater department. What started out as a mural gig slowly over the last 15 years has turned into a job that is constantly stretching my ability to create a story visually and has also satisfied my desire to play with many mediums. 

I’ve learned over the years that there is good money and (more importantly) much joy in being an artist and SO MANY WAYS to live that career/calling out. ❤️ 

Artist Statement

My work explores the quiet intersections between memory, nature, and the rhythms that shape our everyday lives. I’m drawn to the repetition found in both the natural world and in human patterns—how the texture of bark, the stitching of fabric, or the shape of a leaf all echo the cycles of growth, loss, and renewal that we experience.

Negative space plays a purposeful role in my paintings, inviting pause and reflection. The spaces left unpainted become just as meaningful as the marks that define them—mirroring how memory often holds what is missing as dearly as what remains.

Rooted in nostalgia, my work carries traces of my upbringing: my grandmother’s sewing, my aunts’ flower gardens, and family camping trips that blurred the boundaries between comfort and wilderness. These fragments of personal history find new form through layered color, organic patterns, and softened geometry—moments that feel both remembered and reimagined.

Across my collections, I explore how patterns repeat but never perfectly—how we return to places, thoughts, and emotions, each time slightly changed. Through this balance of structure and spontaneity, my paintings become meditations on belonging, impermanence, and the beauty of ordinary cycles.

Updates

I currently live in Champaign, IL, with my wife and twin daughters. I’m a full-time art professor at Richland Community College in Decatur, IL, and I maintain an active mixed-media studio practice. My work explores imagery and themes related to the movie-watching experience.  

Artist Statement

My studio practice places an emphasis on movies as both content and material. Looking at my work can feel like having a conversation with a video store clerk. In the gallery, the work functions much like a clerk recommending films to a customer—a video store clerk who’s simply passionate about movies. Their qualifications to recommend may extend no further than their love of cinema and a wide range of viewing experience, but their comments are sincere. The clerk offers warm, subjective takes on the films they adore and sharp, snark-filled reactions to the ones they don’t. Their recommendations span a range of favorites, guilty pleasures, and highbrow works, thrilling action scenes, moments of sentiment or nostalgia, bits of film trivia, favorite characters, metaphors, and analogies (Avatar is Dances with Wolves meets Fern Gully). The conversation isn’t always profound or analytical. Sometimes it may be frivolous, hyperbolic, or filled with exaggeration, but it remains honest and affectionate in its love of movies.

Lately, I’ve put my focus on the Academy Awards. I paint nominees caught in the moment just before their win or loss, when their faces hold the tension of public expectation and personal ambition. It’s a performative, emotional freeze-frame that reflects as much about the spectacle itself as it does about the individuals involved. These works explore how value is assigned within the film industry and what that reveals about broader cultural narratives around success, identity, visibility, and change.

I also mine from Oscar-winning films as a kind of evolving canon, tracing how themes, aesthetics, and social norms shift over time. In doing so, I point to the oscillations between progress and tradition, representation and omission, spectacle and substance. The works function as both celebration and critique.

Updates

I started working at the Nerman Museum in Overland Park a few months ago, and we just started rotation last week so I have been very, very busy!

Since completing my MFA at Ohio University in 2024, I’ve been teaching art courses for both Ohio University and Pittsburg State University. Last school year I taught Painting, Drawing, and 2D Foundations at Pittsburg State before moving to Lawrence, KS, over the summer. I’m now working as an Exhibition Technician at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park and continuing to assist with online courses for Ohio University. Alongside teaching and museum work, I’ve been developing a new body of work in oil painting to continue my exploration of floral abstraction and digital aesthetics.

Artist Statement

My work visualizes the emotional charge of pop culture through color, pattern, and layered abstraction. I remix floral patterns and decorative motifs—forms often seen as feminine or superficial—to explore how identity and memory are constantly performed, edited, and reimagined.

I start by collaging and manipulating my imagery digitally, then I translate those fragments into expressive paintings and drawings. In this process, the glossy flatness of the screen becomes tactile and human again. Each piece comes together like a self-portrait, filtered through the lens of pop aesthetics: glamorous, saturated, and a bit disorienting.

I am interested in how pattern can act as both camouflage and confession: how it can hold emotion, nostalgia, and performance all at once. My paintings sit somewhere between autofiction and reflection, celebrating the visual noise of the digital age that I grew up within while still searching for sincerity within it.

Updates

Currently I work as an adjunct at Joliet Junior College. I've had a second school in the past but right now it's just JJC where I alternate between teaching 2D Design, 3D Design, and Ceramics. I also maintain a studio ceramics practice under the moniker Cryptid Claywerks. 

Artist Statement

In the years following throwing my first pot over ten years ago, I have taken a different route than following that of traditional pottery, instead utilizing years of practice and skill to explore what I would describe as a more creative and whimsical approach to my works. Inspired by, but deviating from, the traditional face jugs of the Carolinas, I have created a world of fantasy creatures and grotesques whose bodies are functional ceramic wares. I draw much of my inspiration from the Muppets, Labyrinth, various music I enjoy, my experiences working at haunted houses, and my adventures playing D&D, all combined into my love of ceramics as my chosen medium for creative expression.

Most of the cryptids fall into recognizable fantasy races such as orcs and trolls, though I also enjoy frequently creating new creature forms. Many works also have piercings because I want them to reflect the different aspects of my personality and inspiration drawn from other cultures. Some of my works can be personified as happy-go-lucky little guys, while others are definitely a bit more grumpy. I wanted the overall feel of them to highlight what I see as beautiful: features that much of our culture would traditionally call flaws. Think warts, scars, crowfeet, and wrinkles! While some recognize only the scarier side of the cryptids, I definitely feel there's a broad range of emotion, character, and charm brought on by each one of them.

During creation, I am directed by the shape of the vessel and how it has been formed to be the base of my character development process. This time though, I decided from the beginning to create something much larger than my traditional body of work. The coil pots currently on display have been created this way because I wanted them to have more of an impact on the viewer in both scale and facial features that my smaller works just can not convey at their scale. Each one of the coils affects the cryptid in multiple ways, detailing both how that particular pot was formed, and additionally how the depth of expression in the character forms from the vessel itself.

Artist Statement

At the core of my practice is the act of reclaiming permission. Permission to feel, to contradict, to imagine without consequence. As a Peruvian artist navigating identity between South and North, Spanish and English, my work becomes a way of taking space; not just metaphorically, but literally. I build forms that interrupt, inflate, and collapse. I use materials considered cheap or throwaway to let go of the expectation of something perfect. I let softness occupy scale. I let ambiguity insist on being felt. Being a woman, immigrant. As an "alien in transit," we are taught to answer, clarify, or behave. I let my practice expand, blur, and linger.

My background is in graphic design a field where things must be clear, usable, and purposeful. Design, for me, was not only about finding order. I let its clarity fall apart until something more vulnerable shows through.

I'm drawn to the moment when a form fails. When communication glitches. When something no longer makes perfect sense, and because of that, becomes more alive. My work doesn't aim to resolve; it wants to hold contradiction.

Inflatables are a big part of my sculptural language. They take up space but aren't solid. They breathe. They collapse. They remind me of language, of bodies, of monuments we no longer believe in. I let them deflate. I want the viewer to see the transformation and still find beauty in it, especially in the failure. I want to show that collapse is not the end of meaning; it can be the start of another kind.

I think of them as soft monuments, not because they're gentle, but because they hold contradiction. They look heavy, but they're light. They look still, but carry the effort it took to move them. They seem solid, but they shift. Their softness is not about material, it's about allowing multiple truths to exist at once.

Updates

I have moved to Boston and am pursuing my MFA in Painting at Boston University currently! I am really enjoying my new studio, part of a great creative atmosphere, and continuing to create work with themes of rural farm life and family.

Artist Statement

I value the power of portraying the reality of life – translating the deepest emotional states and experiences through the language of the body – human or animal. It is not only a medium to engage in conversation with society but also a dynamic tool to question societal norms. Ultimately, it is to invoke meaningful thought through a visual language that can cross all language barriers.

My work draws inspiration from growing up on my family's multi-generational farm, thinking about themes of sacrifice, loss, and family through imagery inspired from personal experiences on the farm.

Growing up on the farm meant growing up surrounded by animals. Early on, I witnessed the complex social structures of our animals and always saw my own life mirrored into theirs. My body of work explores my experiences on the farm using animals as a symbolic vessel to portray this reality of life, both on the farm and beyond. 

Updates

Frankie Flood is Professor and Area Head of Metalsmithing and Jewelry Design at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. He previously served as Director of the Digital Craft Research Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Flood holds a Master of Fine Arts in Metalsmithing from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, as well as a Master of Arts in Metalsmithing and a Bachelor of Arts in Art Education from Eastern Illinois University.

Flood’s research explores the potential of craft to serve both local and global communities through design and fabrication. He integrates traditional craft practices with emerging digital technologies, focusing on the intersections between making, innovation, and accessibility. His recent work with 3D-printed prosthetics and adaptive devices has gained international attention, while his founding of the Digital Craft Research Lab established new opportunities for students pursuing digital fabrication.

Most recently, Flood created tactile airplane models for the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution to improve accessibility for visitors with limited vision. These artifacts are now on permanent display at the Wright Brothers exhibit and throughout ten additional museum galleries.

www.frankieflood.com

Artist Statement

I seek to blend technology with traditional craft as a way to make new discoveries in my work and reinvigorate the
processes of the past. This body of work is inspired by Japanese cast iron teapots called tetsubin. My goal with this
work was to investigate the complex forms and patterns that can be created via CAD processes and explore the
potential for new surfaces and patterns that might be possible with the use of technology. I am also interested in
exploring how technology, conversely, might lead to the creation of one of a kind objects that again contain aura and
the digital and analog mark of the craftsperson. The resulting work is a one of a kind series of objects that investigate
form, surface, material, process, function, and seeks to understand the impact that technology will continue to have
on creative practice as well as our lives.

Process

The teapots were 3D modeled in a CAD program called Rhino, manipulated in Slicer for Fusion and Rhino, and then
3D printed in PLA plastic. Ceramic shell and plaster/ silica traditional investment molds were created from the plastic
print and then burned out (just like a lost wax process except with a 3D print) in a kiln. I poured iron into the mold
and then once cool, removed all sprues and vents that funnel metal into the mold cavity and then finished via filing
and sanding in an attempt to preserve the surface qualities from both the printing and casting processes.

Updates

I am currently the Painting Program Director at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and teach courses in Painting, Drawing, Illustration, and Digital Graphics. I also have an ongoing studio practice and continue to show work across the nation (the most recent show landed will be a three-person show in 2027). In addition to art, I co-lead girls' and womens' outreach and Bible study at an action sports ministry. Go team! 

Artist Statement

My work is really about the human condition. I use landscape and Scripture to address it.

In my work, I am interested in how our individual relationship with the landscape and natural phenomena can lead us to think about time, place, memory, and the interconnectivity of our relationships with one another and Creation. My own experiences in the landscape of the American Southwest have reinforced and brought life to Scripture and have shown me how sorrow can be turned to joy. To show holy awareness in relation to the natural world, I draw upon the history of landscape painting and abstraction, together with ecotheology, which focuses on the understanding that people and creatures are gifts of God the Creator.

I combine practices of drawing, painting, printmaking, and graphic design to create a visual language that can communicate the complexity of my encounters. Images sharpen, fragment, overlap, and completely dissolve, much like human perception, memory, and existence. The combination of images and stylistic decisions allow for clarity in the unknown and symbolize the transformation of mourning into thanksgiving.

1 Peter 5:8-11
“...(9)Remember that your family of believers all over the world is going through the same kind of suffering you are. ...(10)So after you have suffered a little while, he will restore, support, and strengthen you, and he will place you on a firm foundation.” (NLT)

Updates

I recently graduated from the University of Delaware with a Master of Fine Arts and am currently a Fellow at Winterthur Museum, Library, and Garden. I continue to develop my studio practice, exploring themes of identity, materiality, and transformation through sculpture, ceramics, and mixed media. 

Artist Statement

I am drawn to the power of miniatures, as vessels of memory, longing, and transformation, small objects contain vast histories and emotions. My work explores these ideas through personal and collective stories. Inspired by Susan Stewart's On Longing, I am interested in how miniatures convey and preserve desire and narrative through the lens of Akuaba, an Akan fertility symbol also linked to ancestry and cultural continuity. I use clay, plastic, chocolate and found objects, I combine traditional and contemporary techniques such as modeling, casting, and printing to recontextualize inherited symbols into modern narratives. Through my explorations, I aim to spark conversations around the complexities of identity and narratives embedded in material culture.

Updates

I am currently the art teacher at Charleston High School. I have a home studio where I paint commissions, mostly pet and family portraits. I am so happy to still be a part of Charleston's community! 

Artist Statement

I make oil paintings, drawings, and ceramic work heavily inspired by nature and simple moments in time. I enjoy the repetition of making self portraits year after year, as well as capturing moments that feel like home.

Updates

Since graduation I have been working for a furniture moving company and in the time I’m not moving furniture I am actively looking for a job working for a museum. I have some volunteer experience for a county museum down in Newton in the next few months. Adjusting my studio practice around this new schedule has been tricky but it hasn’t halted my desires to create.

Artist Statement

The act of being “lost in thought” is the drive of my artistic practice. Inspired by the quirkiness of surrealism, playfulness of book illustration, and ironies of daily life, my work explores the world as perceived through a child-like lens. In this age where we are constantly burdened by stress, it is essential to connect with our inner child’s urge to wonder and embrace curiosity. Through the collaboration between ‘simple’ artist tools with toys and trinkets, I am connecting my viewer to the universally shared human experience: childhood.

Plastic toys, stuffed animals, and other trinkets are my primary subject matter. Toys and animals uniquely trigger natural human desires to protect and care while ironically providing a sense of comfort for an individual. Through thoughtfully playful compositions, my work characterizes this silly, yet complex aspect of human nature and light-heartedly pokes at ironies of daily life. While the initial response is inevitably charged with a humorous and endearing nostalgia, these playful arrangements invite viewers to ponder the deeper complexities of the human experience.

Updates

After earning my BFA in Graphic Design from EIU in 2023, I’ve continued to nurture my creative practice through freelance work. I began working with the Tarble as a student and have since grown into my current role as Audience Development Manager. Over the past three and a half years, I’ve been grateful to contribute to the museum’s growth and community. As I prepare to depart at the end of 2025, my next chapter remains unwritten, but I’m confident it will be one of continued creativity and success.

Artist Statement

Through whimsical depictions of animals and plants, I celebrate imagination and invite viewers to do the same. Drawn to the tactile process of printmaking and linoleum block carving, I find the act of carving and inking to be both grounding and therapeutic—a way to transform my doodles into more realized forms.

I believe not all art needs to carry a profound message; it can simply be about play. I create in collaboration with my inner child, embracing the weird and whimsical as a way to offer care, kindness, and healing to my subconscious.

Curio Cabinet is still in its juvenile stage—growing, shifting, and discovering its full potential, just as every child does. Inspired by the world around me, I continually ask, “What brings you joy?”—and then, I create.

Updates

After receiving my MA at EIU, I returned to Chicago, where I maintained a painting practice at the Cornelia Arts Building while also teaching at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. In 2015, I moved to Madison, WI, with my husband and two daughters. Since establishing myself within the art community in Madison, I have had opportunities to show consistently around Wisconsin, Illinois, and New York. I built a studio in my backyard, and currently I am busy producing a new body of work for various group shows and an upcoming solo show in Madison. I am also teaching oil painting through my own business. I teach color theory, art history, and painting technique to a mostly retired group of students three days a week.

Artist Statement

I use the natural world as a vector for exploring themes of beauty and discovery and as a way of embracing hope, virility, and fragility. The intricacy of life that springs forth when it seems as though the world is forever dormant rings miraculous every time, and plant silhouettes speak to the simplicity of this cycle and the surprise of it.

I paint textile patterns tangled with plants and intricately rendered strips of fabric that lay across landscapes. This combination of nature and textile is a way of exploring our place in the world. Familiar patterns and fabric are inextricably connected to daily life and personal comforts, and the graphic quality of the fabric contrasts with the silhouettes and natural scenes to present an unexpected dichotomy. We are at once close to the natural world and separate from it, and the folds of the painted textiles mimic natural forms while also sitting on top of the landscape. Obscuring pivotal pieces of the scene is a way of commenting on the truth that we never see the whole of any place, experience, or person. The paintings celebrate life’s discoveries and hidden truths.

Amidst a world of noise, the distilled nature of a contemplative world can be lost but for the moments of beauty that give us pause. My paintings are representations of the growth that we find around us. They are meditations on the internal garden of our pensive minds and the external celebration of an abundant world.

Updates

I am currently working as an adjunct instructor at Lake Land College in Mattoon, where I teach Ceramics, 3D Design, and Understanding Art (Art Appreciation). Next semester they are giving me the opportunity to teach Printmaking, which I am arguably too excited about (haha). I'm also working on some freelance work for businesses in Effingham during the holidays!

Artist Statement

I use a wide variety of media to depict my constantly derailing train of thought through opposing linear and gestural elements. Oscillating between nonlinear narration and abstraction, my process becomes more important than any specific reference. I invite the viewer to engage with the chaotic accumulation of line and color and indulge in the lost feeling they might experience.

Updates

I am currently pursuing my MFA at Miami University in Oxford, OH. I still have a rich studio practice involving painting and printmaking. I enjoy being a Teaching Assistant here and I’m looking forward to graduation in spring of 2026!

Artist Statement

My work centers on the quiet, often overlooked moments of everyday life. Through oil paintings, I document mundane domestic or personal scenes that might otherwise pass without notice. Deliberate use of vibrant color, perspective, and detail elevate these familiar moments and lend them a cinematic quality. I want viewers to pause and reconsider the beauty and complexity in what’s usually considered boring or unremarkable. At the heart of my practice is a kind of truth-telling. I’m interested in honest depictions of how people actually live, not the curated ‘perfection’ often seen on social media. The messy, imperfect, and deeply human habits we all share serve as my inspiration. By painting these scenes, I’m not only documenting my life, but reflecting on a collective reality.

Alongside the narrative works, I create mixed media companion pieces that isolate specific objects or related elements from the scenes. While the larger paintings capture usual routines, the companion pieces shift the focus from action to artifact. Moving from the everyday moment to the everyday object allows me to explore how something familiar can reveal intimate details about a person’s presence or personality. These companion pieces almost become abstract portraits in and of themselves that reflect the changing nature of our everyday lives. Ultimately, my practice is about valuing an authentic human experience, and looking closer at the actions and objects that so deeply define us, but get no attention.

Updates

After more than a decade at the Tarble—from student worker to Deputy Director of Public Engagement—I’ve made the decision to close out this chapter at the end of 2025 and start a new one centered on balance, family, and creative growth. This next chapter will focus on growing Hank Design, the design collaborative I co-founded with two fellow EIU alums in 2021. I will continue to explore storytelling through publication design, visual identities, and more for small businesses, artists, and cultural organizations.

Artist Statement

It’s fluid. It’s viscous. It’s sweet and translucent. It’s bitter and opaque. It’s processing in real-time: grief, anxiety, parenthood, change, separation, self-preservation, loss, and growth. It’s learning. It’s unlearning. It’s relearning. It’s a celebration and a resistance.

Still in its early stages—a freshly spilled carton—Cherry Milk explores material experimentation, mark-making, and constraint as meditations on health, parenthood, and inherited trauma.

These Droplets are fragments of memory, recalled with my non-dominant hand as both an ode to my father—still recovering from his second stroke and learning to live without the use of his dominant hand—and to my son, the only left-handed person in my family.

Updates

Since my time at EIU, I’ve received my MFA, have attended a number of artist residencies, and have been supported by fellowships at NXTHVN (New Haven, CT), The Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT). I am currently working on my first public sculpture to be installed at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT.

Artist Statement

I am dead serious about joy, and my work is an exuberant insistence on hope—an unapologetic reclamation of agency, visibility, and care. Through a process-based, materially exploratory practice, I make abstract sculptures and paintings that embrace conceptions of communal empowerment, joy as resilience, and hope as practice.

My work is influenced by my Hispanic and Indigenous lineage, alongside formative experiences within fundamentalist religious institutions. A granddaughter of migrant farm workers and daughter of an evangelical pastor, I have a personal and familial history of invisibility, learned through systems of injustice and taught within patriarchal structures. Now distanced from these systems, my work is a deliberate practice of reclamation and resistance.

Honoring familial ingenuity, I build sculptures using a majority recycled and reused materials, making do with what I have readily available. I collect paper trash from my neighborhood that I sort, pulverize, and transform into pulp. Each sculpture is sealed with the handmade pulp and embedded with found objects and buried notes, preserving memory and imbuing intentionality within the form itself. I then paint the forms with playful, bold colors and reference luscious textures and patterns from both my physical environment and from memories of my childhood New Mexican landscape.

Portals, circles, and stripes are recurring throughout each piece, representative of change, connection, and a practice of attention. My work is a celebration of these ideas—they are altars, prayers, and monuments for joy and belonging.

Updates

Currently, I am pursuing Masters of Fine Arts at University of New Orleans. I am having some experienced artists visiting my studio space soon in December, and I'm really excited for that. I am practicing my work passionately. 

Moreover, I am exploring different art culture and galleries in New Orleans. People love art here. I will be soon be doing some exhibitions. I would need your good wishes. 

I miss Charleston. I am very thankful for what I learned at Doudna Fine Arts Center, EIU. It made my dreams come true and made me a successful artist. I am proud to be an Alumni of EIU. 

Artist Statement

Collage enables me to express my freedom of thought. I am inspired by the life experiences of various ethnicities. I conduct surveys among international students to gain insights into what may be causing them distress or unease. Their stories help me cultivate ideas. I visualize these thoughts in my designs by intersecting traditional cultural references with modern expression.

I create the digital collages by integrating photos and illustrations. My body of work has also taken other forms in mixed media. Moreover, I include Urdu calligraphy to emphasize the message. I use hand-scripted Urdu calligraphy as it is my native language from Pakistan. It helps establish a unifying identity in my designs. I begin my collages by exploring several ideas. These ideas are based on thoughts that I visualize to describe a message or highlight a story. I experiment with visuals through the design process to develop the story. My art is inspired by a miniature artist, Shahzia Sikander. Her work is based on mental emancipation and addressing social issues.

Through collage, my goal is to bring awareness to the people around me. I want to shed light on the situations of people in the world. In an unstable world, there are many stories to be told from many parts of the world. In my art, I emphasize those stories through collage, which, for me, becomes a way of understanding. I aspire to open a dialogue that raises awareness around mental concerns, prioritizing them as a vital aspect of our society.

Updates

I'm excited to share a little about my journey and passions. 

Currently, I serve as an Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Georgia in Oakwood, GA, a military state university where I lead the Graphic Design program. My love for arts and design education has shaped my path—from earning a BFA at EIU to an MFA at Indiana University Bloomington—inspired by Prof. David Richardson, now a colleague. Outside the classroom, I continue my design practice as a freelance designer and exhibit my own typefaces. I'm also involved in Atlanta's dynamic art scene and proudly serve as Vice President of the AIGA Atlanta chapter. 

Artist Statement

This work-in-progress poster series features a bold, geometric sans-serif typeface with clean lines and sharp, disruptive details. Infused with radical expression, it challenges typographic conventions while maintaining clarity and balance. Designed for impact, this display type merges modern restraint with daring choices, offering striking energy and bold visual presence for any creative project.

Updates

After studying metalsmithing with David Griffin I went to graduate school at Indiana University and received my MFA in metalsmithing and jewelry design in 2016. I am currently an assistant professor of 3D sculpture media at Augusta University in Augusta, GA. I have a studio practice focused around sustainable 3D printing materials and reusing secondhand plastic objects to make wearable sculptures.

Artist Statement

I am interested in the development of plastic alternatives and how to re-use plastics as art materials. My sculptures are made from two types of eco-friendly 3D printing filaments; recycled PLA made entirely from post-consumer food and beverage containers, and fully-biodegradable, non-petroleum derived PHA bio-polymer which is synthesized using microorganisms such as bacteria, algae, and fungi.

I draw from visual information I’ve gathered over the years from my daily environment. Through documentation and memory, I’ve recreated forms and shapes reminiscent of functional objects like vintage kitchen plastics and local flora and merged them with patterns and colors taken from places I’ve lived or visited to describe recent and distant memories throughout my life. These aspects of my daily surroundings form an essential part of my life and by placing them in abstract compositions they create a new way to describe my relationship with objects and places around me.

Updates

I currently serve as the Art Department Chair and Lead Upper School Art Teacher at Hampton Roads Academy in Newport News, VA. In addition to my teaching role, I am an active practicing artist in the local community, accepting commissions and exhibiting my work. Most recently, my artwork was featured in the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition, Where We Meet.

Artist Statement

My paintings draw inspiration from the powerful, often enigmatic feelings and memories that define us as individuals. My paintings act as a visual diary inviting the viewer to participate in the intimacy of my lived experiences shifting the viewer from passive observer to conscious participant. Each brushstroke is a deliberate act of preservation to reclaim agency, transforming voyeurism into a means of introspection rather than control. When I sit and paint, I engage with my subconscious desires, not someone else’s projection. I come to know myself, what I want, who I love, what I fear, and Who I am. Through bold color, dynamic mark-making, and a balance of realism and abstraction, I strive to build a sense of found family and community through my work, inviting others to step into the feelings and memories that shaped each piece. My hope is that these moments of connection spark recognition, encouraging viewers to reflect on their own experiences, the people who feel like home, and the memories they hold close.

Updates

I retired from the Rat Race over a decade ago, so I'm up to about whatever I want to be - which happens to be making art. I have a studio in my home here in Charleston. I enjoy showing my art regionally, participating in as many as I can. Shows and exhibitions provide me with a social outlet and keep me challenging myself to do better and more original artwork.

Artist Statement

My work predominately centers around my love of rural life and makes use of the Principles and Elements of Design to create visually stimulating images that are compelling and satisfying to view. For me, the purpose of art is just that: to create a visual experience for the eyes and the mind that begins from a first glimpse and continues through closer inspection. There are many ways to do this, of course, and I prefer to not be overly formulaic. However, I have used my series of BackYardFlashBacks to explore the subject of home and womanhood extensively. I like to think most of my work meets, at least, my own aforementioned criteria for successful artworks.

As far as my choice of media goes, I don't know of anyone else who uses alcohol based inks in the way I do. I developed my technique over the past fifteen or so years having started out using art markers. Now I use the same inks as markers, but I apply them with brushes, blending and manipulating the inks on special paper and panels.

I enjoy showing my work in both exhibitions and competitions. I especially like displaying my pieces for local audiences where I can easily see old friends and make new ones. In short, I connect with the world through my artworks.

Updates

Since graduating I have worked at a screen printing business, auction house, and now I’m a Marketing Coordinator and Graphic Designer for a financial advisory firm. I do work on personal projects in my free time to keep the creative juices flowing.

Artist Statement

This series contemplates the ordinary objects that come alive in The Shadows of Nightfall. Lighthouses, drive-ins, lampposts, and big rigs—each designed to guide, gather, or move through darkness—transform in daylight. Exposed under the sun, they stand as quiet monuments, waiting for night to come back to life.

Artist Statement

I use visual narrative to showcase the beauty, complexity, experiences, and impact of human actions on the environment.

My artistic medium is pyrography on calabash (gourd) pieces. With a hot soldering iron, I draw elaborate forms and patterns of aquatic creatures onto the surfaces and interiors of the calabash. The soldering iron creates ingrained scorched impressions on the calabash's surfaces, giving it an ethereal appearance.

I chose the calabash as a surface for its traditional and cultural significance in my home country Ghana, and fluidity of gourd’s shape and hemispheric nature enhances the visual compositions of my drawings.

The burning technique I use on the calabash represents the actions of human beings that affect and permanently impact the delicate geo-biological forms of nature.

Currently, I am employing new artistic techniques such as the weaving of fishing nets to compliment the calabash pieces.

Updates

I recently completed my MFA in Painting at Boston University and have since moved to Providence, RI. I’m currently teaching as a Continuing Education instructor at RISD and also work part-time at St. Paul’s School, where I teach drawing and painting. In addition, I’m participating in a yearlong residency at the Umbrella Arts Center outside of Boston, which provides me with a studio, teaching opportunities, and an exhibition in the end. Finally, I had a baby girl called Elena, who is 3 months old.

Artist Statement

My work explores the relationship between time, space, movement, and perception, focusing on how technological and institutional structures quietly shape the way we see. I am particularly interested in how shifts in visual technologies, from early optical devices and photography to contemporary systems of circulation, have reorganized our sense of place and experience. Influenced by artists who responded to the conditions of industrialization, such as Georges Seurat, my approach is observational rather than declarative. I work within set routines, repeating daily actions under time constraints and with limited materials. This framework allows images to surface slowly as records of labor, attention, and accumulated change.

Rather than illustrate a narrative, each piece becomes a container for memory, time, and perceptual drift. I often begin with a field of black and work subtractively to reveal form, allowing space and architecture to emerge as sites where time settles. In contrast to the speed of digital media and the saturation of images in daily life, my practice invites slower ways of looking and being. The goal is not to resolve or explain but to offer a place for reflection. I am interested in how perception is shaped not only by what we see but by how we move through the world.

Updates

Since graduating in 2002, I have been an Art teacher at a public school just outside of Decatur in the small rural district of Warrensburg-Latham.  I have always seen myself as much artist as educator, and I continue to make artwork for myself and others in a variety of mediums. 

Updates

After living in Detroit for four years, I moved back to Chicago in 2021, where I currently have an active drawing and painting studio practice in a home studio. I’ve recently started exploring the world of Risography printing and hope to continue studying/working with it as a complimentary addition to my studio practice.  

Artist Statement

My work explores ideas of perception through invented systems and structures as a symbolic representation of a metaphorical interpretation of reality. The drawing process operates as a record of how we navigate the man-made systems in which we live our lives. Rooted in an objective structure (the grid), hand drawn marks represent subjective individualities much like our human fingerprint. Working with the technological use of mapping, pattern, and language, I attempt to blind gaps between self and environment, present experience and past record, and open a perceptual window into a world of shifting possibilities.

Updates

Since graduating from EIU, I received my MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. I'm currently a Lecturer at SAIC in the Painting and Drawing Department. My studio practice is active and I have been in numerous solo and group exhibitions. I'm grateful for my time at EIU as it led to many opportunities! 

Artist Statement

I’m a multidisciplinary artist who incorporates elements from the environment into works testing the bounds of beauty. I gather weeds and flora. And I press these botanicals at various stages of degradation into clay, a medium that narrows and arrests time and simultaneously reveals a universe of detail – the clay negative serves as a mold to cast into. Final ceramic forms are vessels, cylinders, and fragments, and, in acrylic, relief paintings. These works are metaphors. Major life events, especially the loss of my father, have highlighted for me the fragility of life and the ephemerality of existence. 

Updates

I have been teaching at the college level for the past 18 years.  Currently, I am a professor and area head of painting at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, MO. I continue to maintain a studio practice and show my work regularly and represented by ZG Gallery in Chicago.

Artist Statement

The images in my artwork are derived from a synthesis of influences including science fiction, anatomical illustrations, cartoons, controversial trends in science, general themes in nature, and the human condition.

Like many artists, my experiences as a youth and adolescent have had a profound influence on the imagery that permeates my artwork. Growing up on a horse farm, I witnessed firsthand the hyper manipulation of nature and natural process for human use.  Livestock are routinely subjected to selective breeding, artificial insemination, ultrasound scanning and inoculations solely for commercial purposes.  What initially begins as harmless bio-mimicry - creating a better future through chemistry and technology - devolves into a dystopia, rife with the cast-offs of unintended consequences and a garbage dump heap of bionic refuse stacked and left to rust and rot.

I have become increasingly interested in the closing gap between science fiction and science-fact. Cloning, genetic engineering, transgenic breading, and food modification are just a handful of supposed advanced have sparked my imagination.  I approach my work by imaging the experiments that have gone awry and try to create a world where the byproducts resist expiration.  I like to think of the resulting characters as inhabiting a world that parallels our own, similarly confronted with the same emotional struggles as humankind. My paintings result in images of biomorphic beings, fluctuating between success and failure in their own dayglo world of desolation.

Updates

I am currently the Marketing Supervisor and sole in-house Graphic Designer for the St. Charles Park District in St. Charles, IL. My design work is featured across more than ten district facilities, including an aquatic park, golf course, minigolf course and recreation center, as well as throughout our parks and natural areas. I also design and layout the district’s quarterly Activity Guide, distributed to over 33,000 residents, and create cohesive branding and visual identities for a variety of special events. I truly love what I do, and every day offers a new challenge that pushes me to think creatively, adapt quickly and keep learning.

Artist Statement

Since my graduation from EIU in 2003, I have worked as a graphic designer for over 20 years for several different companies. Most recently, for the last ten years, I have had the privilege of working for the St. Charles Park District in St. Charles, IL, as the Marketing Supervisor and sole in-house designer. As a designer within a parks and recreation organization, my work is rooted in a deep appreciation for nature, community and visual storytelling. I believe that design has the power to connect people—to inspire them to explore, engage and protect the spaces around them. Through thoughtful typography, color and imagery, I aim to reflect the beauty of our parks and facilities and the vibrancy of the communities they serve.

My design process balances creativity and purpose. Whether I'm developing signage that helps visitors navigate a trail, branding a community event, or creating large format display signage for one of our ten facilities, I strive for clarity, inclusivity and emotional resonance. Every project is an opportunity to celebrate public spaces and make them more accessible and inviting to all.

Ultimately, my goal is to create design that doesn't just inform, but invites and welcomes curiosity, fosters belonging and helps tell the ongoing story of our shared community, parks and natural spaces.

Artist Statement

The characters in my figurative paintings interface with ambiguous social, bodily, and environmental happenings as a metaphor for the ways we navigate our tenuous contemporary moment. Dr. Blasey-Ford's courageous testimony and the #MeToo movement fueled my bravery in making paintings about my survivorship. I ask questions about the impact of gender performance and trauma on relationships, selfhood, and experiences of space.

In my Pink Apocalypse series, figures react to an apocalyptic turn of events - the sky is often in the process of turning an unnatural shade of pink, and characters reveal ominous magenta wounds. Characters prepare for wanted or unwanted changes, real or imagined threats, and sufficient or insufficient resolutions in an uncertain future. Within and between groups, responses to environmental forces vary, creating either tension or solidarity. My work grapples with the roles figures play actively or inactively, together or divided, in both contributing to and addressing internal and external crises.

My painted environments are densely layered, using visual patterns to reference cyclical patterns of thought and normative behavior that are laced into our perceived realities. These patterns are interwoven with direct and indirect social pressures, impacting both body and mind. As I move through and react to the world around me as a survivor and a femme lesbian, I feel myself both bend to and resist these pressures. Multiple self-portraits in these paintings behave as different characters to embody the inner conflicts in my quest to hold on to agency, authentic voice, and community.

Sometimes, imminent destruction feels certain, and other times, watching women and queer people around me remain critical, brave, empathetic, and inventive in the face of ongoing threats assures me of our communal potential. These paintings envision space for problem-solving, collaboration, and resistance in turbulent shared environments. By envisioning parallel, pink-saturated realities, each painting raises questions about how care, rebellion, and imaginative rituals function as crucial forms of resistance and endurance when structures crumble.

Updates

I still have studio practice, but I am exploring more of my media side (Photography, video production, and Graphic design) in the Department of Communication Studies (Journalism). I still plan to further my art studies in an MFA in Studio Art program to become an art professor and contribute to the lives of other students back in Ghana.

Artist Statement

“He who does not look back to where he came from will not know where he is going." I am a contemporary Ghanaian artist driven by a passion for celebrating visual identity while placing it in a global and contemporary art context to bridge the gap between tradition and modernity. This series invites us to reflect on the stories we carry and the symbols that define us. My experience as a photographer, graphic designer, and artist shapes my approach to creating these pieces. I draw inspiration from the symbols that profoundly represent concepts, proverbs, and values that reflect the complexities of life, community, and spirituality. I explore the fusion of these symbols with contemporary portrait drawings to create a dialogue between them. This approach is intimate and evocative, capturing the essence of the subject while also extending the artwork’s thematic resonance. The use of coffee-toned paper adds warmth and organic texture, representing the earthiness of human existence and the passage of time. Central to most pieces are the symbols, carefully incorporated into the composition. These symbols are not merely decorative; they serve as visual anchors, imbuing the work with themes such as leadership, unity, peace, religion, beauty, women’s empowerment, and independence. By integrating a subtle yet powerful symbol into the background, I also aim to honor these timeless concepts while connecting them to the subject.

Updates

I currently work part-time as a Graphic Designer and Photographer at Aikman Wildlife Adventure in Arcola, IL. On my days off, I work on developing my personal art. Recently, I painted a mural at my aunt's vet office in Pekin.

Artist Statement

Mother Nature’s beauty is being destroyed by humanity. I want to bring attention back to the stunning world around us in hopes to inspire mindful appreciation of nature and encourage conservation of animals.

Updates

I am currently living and working in Maine as a landscaper and artist. I am on the Artsworth board and have been painting windows and one mural at Fogtown Brewing Company this year. 

Artist Statement

Grace Otzwirk graduated with her BFA in 2022 and her MA in 2023. She uses found objects, pen, graphite, paints, and printmaking in her practice. Otzwirk lives in coastal Maine and works as a landscaper. She gains inspiration from working in nature, observing intriguing forms like seaweed, and in daily life with her muse and husband, Michael. Otzwirk is currently interested in the usage of light, color, and detail in her practice.

Updates

I am a dual-department faculty member in Computer Science & Engineering and Fine Art at St. Joseph's Academy in St. Louis, MO. I'm currently teaching Digital Photography, Digital Design, and Graphic Design alongside my creative practice.

Artist Statement

My work explores paradox as both a philosophical and visual principle, drawing on Eastern philosophy and religious ideas of complementary opposites. Through formal language, I explore how contradictions coexist in a visual system, pointing toward universality rather than fragmentation.

Updates

I left the art world professionally in 2023, after working in museums and galleries around the country. Since graduating from EIU I have lived and worked in the art world in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. My career path took me from Art Handler to Gallery Registrar and now I am in Project Management. I still have a studio practice that ranges from wood-working to drawing and painting. 

Artist Statement

These works aim to take a look at language systems and approach how we assign current structures within.

Artist Statement

We have a deep-rooted desire to see ourselves in a different light. In us lies an unspoken urge to observe ourselves; to be the object in the mirror that’s looking back. My work embodies the skewed perspectives we have of ourselves. This imagery allows us to consider that the way we see ourselves is transitory, always under construction, and never a constant truth.

Updates

Got my MFA from NIU after Eastern, 2019. Been exhibiting regularly and teaching art in Elgin. Started a gallery co-op in Chicago with other NIU artists called Purple Window where I curate and exhibit yearly. 

Artist Statement

My work explores the transitional nature of the undergraduate experience, using exaggerated light and abstracted forms to point out both the limitation and mythologization of memory. I use real snapshots taken during my college years to inspire paintings that highlight the happier parts of what I remember about those times - house parties, bar scenes, cluttered dorm rooms, night life, etc... At times the memory becomes so distorted that the painting itself becomes a mere impression of the event, a blurry attempt at trying to remember what happened. These wild memories represent a slice of life unique to the college experience that I believe are relatable to anyone who went to school not just for their education, but for growth and adventure, too.

My current series of oil paintings feature surprise compositions I caught on my phone during everyday instances - a night out at a bar, a party, working in my studio, or sitting on the couch. In these compositions I found joy in pushing around oil paint to create illusions of depth or form. I’m thrilled with the effects of light and color on everyday objects and obsessed with the abstracted translations that happen alongside illusions of realism.

Updates

Currently, I am teaching painting, printmaking and art appreciation at Carl Sandburg College located in Galesburg, IL, where I have been teaching for the last 15 years. I volunteer and teach classes at The Galesburg Community Art Center and have been in the process of coordinating the new printmaking open studio. This year alone I have been accepted in nine shows, two of which have been solos. 

Artist Statement

I started my art education at Black Hawk Community College where I obtained my associate’s degree in art in 2002. From there I continued my education at Eastern Illinois University where I studied painting, printmaking and other general art mediums. After completing my bachelor’s degree in 2005, I continued on to earn a master’s degree with a focus in printmaking in 2006. As a student I was able to explore many mediums and found that I had a passion for printmaking. That however is a very hard to medium to continue without the proper equipment, that is when I started to dive into painting more and more. I have always like to create and it was out of necessity that painting became my new passion.

After graduation I started my family and soon after my second son was born I was hired at Carl Sandburg College where I have been teaching since 2010. I was also fortunate to spend a couple years at my alma mater Black Hawk Community College. These years teaching have helped me expand my work, given me opportunities to inspire young artists and the ability to network with some truly fantastic artists.

The style of my work as it stands now is linear, almost illustrative in the boldness of the organic lines. Bold black is used to outline objects and figures. These lines are the first things I make, they are created out of a technique called blind contour. This is nothing new to art students or artists but what makes my work my own is that the lines are created with a mood involved. The mood is happiness. The marks are spontaneous, created in the moment and only in that single moment, then they become permanent and cannot be replicated. Every time I put pencil to canvas the marks are made without looking and I leave them where they lay. As the painting progresses layers of paint might be added to the background, some areas get drips, some get covered, gold leaf is added, but the bold lines always come through. The idea of mark making is strong and I encourage my students and people I know to make a mark. What is that mark to someone who is not an artist? That is the mark of handwriting. The past generations wrote much more than the current generation and the idea of making a mark is almost foreign to some people. Just like handwriting my blind contour lines are my own, it is my signature and I have come to love the freedom in this style of art.

Artist that have inspired me have been Marcel Duchamp, “I force myself to contradict myself.” This quote of his is something I live by, it means to keep trying, experimenting and even failing, but just keep going! His work is conceptual and captivating.

Robert Rauschenberg is an artist that treats canvas like a sculpture and his color is out of this world. He allows paint to just be paint and his work is amazing!

Jean Michele Basquiat is currently inspiring me in the ways of street art and spontaneity. He had an approach to covering canvas with such ease and confidence. His work is something truly special.

Frida Kahlo, as cliché as she has become, during these current times has been an artist I relate to on a personal level. I look at her in admiration. I celebrate her being a great Mexican artist, I share the same heritage. I feel for her as she struggled through a hard relationship, I truly understand those back and forth relationships with the love of your life. My heartbreaks for her as she processed miscarriages, I have been there too. I see her work and feel her emotions coming through, they are powerful, genuine and raw.

Updates

I have been working as an art teacher at a private school and other locations in Mattoon.

Artist Statement

My work is a gentle invitation to pause and reconnect with nature, the present moment, and perhaps even oneself. Using watercolor and soft pastel, I explore the quiet beauty waiting to be found in everyday life: the soft ripple of a stream, the golden glow of a sunset on the prairie, or petals caught in the wind.

Throughout my life, it has been in simple moments like these that I’ve experienced some of my greatest "aha moments"now imprinted in my memory forever. These are moments dear to my heart, fleeting as they were, lasting only minutes or even seconds before shifting.

I create ephemeral experiences we can all share, on paper using watercolor in combination with soft pastels or colored pencil. Watercolor gives my work a fluid quality that guides the eye, while pastel and colored pencil add gentle texture. I use repetition in my work for the meditative quality it offers to me and to those who let their eyes follow the patterns.

Artist Statement

This body of work investigates the interplay between narratives found in patterns, meditative mark making, and the visceral experience of color. Through layered painting and collage, I explore how patterns and intuitive gesture can create an emotional resonance, both calming and energize the viewer. Color operates as both an organizing principle and an expressive force, eliciting responses that we often can’t name — warmth, tension, serenity, curiosity. The resulting compositions function as visual meditations on perception, exploring how pattern and chromatic interaction shape sensory and emotional awareness.

Artist Statement

My current body of work focuses on the idea of the object itself. Objects have the potential to be useful, tool-like items or purely ornamental and decorative pieces. I prefer to create work that blends these two areas, producing something that looks as if it could be both functional and placed for display. Some of these pieces fit easily in the hand while others are larger and require more attention to hold. I consider some to be complete devices, while others are components of larger pieces. The idea that each object could have a functional purpose is an important element to my work. 

These objects are fabricated with nonferrous metals, powder coat, and other materials including acrylics and medical tubing. I chose to work primarily with copper due to the malleability and permanence of the metal, and powder coat to add a durable, colorful finish to the piece. Some pieces utilize holes that can be seen as drains or areas where liquid could travel through, which creates tension with the other tubing located in the pieces. For inspiration I look at older medical devices, hardware store parts, and images of advanced technology.

Other areas of interest include the relationship of the body to larger engineered structures. The overall form of the work relies on designs that provide rigidity and stability. In addition, some pieces have tapered ends that could be used to pierce softer materials, while others have passive handles to be held by. Through these elements, I aim to establish a connection between object and viewer.

Updates

Right now I am the Gallery Administrator for the Peoria Art Guild. I also teach relief printmaking classes and am still creating prints.

Artist Statement

Ever since I was young, I have always had an interest in nature. This interest is reflected in my artwork and prints. I am an artist specializing in relief printmaking. With this form of printmaking, you can get such distinctive and detailed marks in your compositions. Because of this, I am able to bring different textures into my prints that make them come to life. I strive to create dynamic compositions that emulate the ones found in nature. My work primarily focuses on birds and their unique behaviors. Capturing the personality of each bird that I create is important to me. In addition to birds, I also enjoy creating works with other themes within nature, such as botanical artwork.

Updates

I’m an art instructor at Champaign Central high school and have been for five years. I just made tenure! I work in my studio most every day for at least 10 minutes but I try to get an hour or more. Some things I’ve been making have been just kind of garbage, but keeping my hand busy and I am experimenting and trying to figure out a new body of work. It’ll be figurative, which is an old practice.

Artist Statement

Flow is fluid, intuitive. A surrender to rhythm and instinct. Locking in is precise, intentional, a moment of clarity and control. Through my art, I navigate the space where these forces collide, finding expression in contrast, repetition, color and timing. Each piece is a meditation on chaos and form.

Artist Statement

Danny Rohr’s work faces personal struggles which plague everyone else, or so he assumes. By addressing life’s challenges in a sculptural form, Rohr finds a connection to others by providing an example of how he works through obstacles with the objective of empowering those who face similar circumstances. We’re all in this together.

Finding a place of comfort in workshop settings, Danny gravitates to a sculptural practice laden with wood and metal. An appreciation of history and a love for writing is where his ideas develop, intuition guides his forms, personal growth, connection with others, and resolution are the goals.

Statement on ‘The End’

The End is a practice in letting go of the past. Combining scraps of wood from a moment of turmoil and loss in life allowed me to focus something when I had no control over anything else. Facing an uncertain future, the compiled mass created an albatross which hung heavy for the next year. Creating The End granted a sense of control during a time of chaos; screwing this wood together was all I could do. Yet it exists as a reminder of a moment that needs to be consigned to the past

I hate The End. An inverted pedestal sits atop the mass to signify that this is not Art. The form’s shape is that of an exclamation point, expressing both the crippling volume of existential turmoil and a punctuation of finality.

Upon the culmination of this exhibition, The End will be discarded, never to be seen again. Viewers are encouraged to add items which no longer serve them. A chapter closes as we usher the next.

Updates

In 2023 I became Executive Director of Rome Art Program, a NYC-based educational nonprofit with summer programs in Rome, Italy. (I was a student there in 2009 and have been teaching with the program since 2015). Along with having the privilege of directing the Program, each year in Rome I teach plein air painting and drawing to BFA & MFA students from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and abroad.

Since 2016 I've worked with Cynthia Byrnes Contemporary Art in Westport, CT, where I serve as Senior Curator for the gallery's corporate clients, such as real estate developers, helping them reach their art acquisition goals.

I also continue my own studio practice and show my work at First Street Gallery in NYC.

It's been a long, crazy, winding road, but I love that I have been able to make art my life.

Artist Statement

The Anonymous series showcases a collection of intimate and evocative monochromatic portrait paintings that derive from a single century-old photograph.

The subject of the portrait is used as a vehicle for expression and each channels different emotional responses, often reflecting the current events of today’s chaotic world. From personal tragedy and distant empathies to a social and political outcry, each painting embodies a degree of ambiguity or anonymity, allowing the viewer to bring their interpretation and response to the table.

Rossi’s journey into the art world began as early as age 5 and was cemented at 12 when she developed a love for ancient Egyptian and Roman art and archaeology. Choosing to pursue art over archaeology, she now incorporates both worlds into her art, as her work often investigates feminine presence derived from memory of ancient figures and artifacts. She uses shifts in tonality and light to explore the duality between solidity and air, linking present and past.

Artist Statement

In contemporary art making, the languages of abstraction are almost inextricable from their academic and theoretical histories, but instead of simply reiterating any of these well-worn dialogues, I opt to only sample them. I have found within this long history of abstract painting many of the tools I use to carry out my own intellectual and aesthetic goals. The pains, joys, failures, challenges and accomplishments that I have experienced in the past, and my anxious anticipations of the future, each find a metaphorical place in the forms, palettes and textures that play out in my work.

Just as time is inherent in what our lives become, as is the process by which a painting is crafted. Purposefully exposing the layered history of my paintings, I instill the works with a complexity that mirrors that of a human experience. I aim for the tension and harmony that result from contrasting organic and geometric forms, neutral and saturated tones, and smooth and rough surfaces to both stimulate the viewer’s emotional and cerebral capacities as well as express my own perceptions and experiences.

I am calloused, tainted, and enlightened.

Updates

Born and raised in Overland Park, KS, Slater Reid Sousley studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, (SAIC), earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in May 2017. Continuing his arts education, Sousley received a Master of Arts in Art degree from Eastern Illinois University in May 2019, earning the Distinguished Graduate Award and the King-Mertz Award of Excellence. In the fall of 2025, Sousley was accepted to the University of Kansas as a Master of Fine Arts candidate. Sousley is currently represented by the McLennon Pen Co. Gallery in Austin, TX.

Artist Statement

I strive to make paintings that are visually striking in their subtlety and simplicity or that maintain an overall harmony despite their complexity and intricacy. Objects and scenes I choose to paint must resonate with me. Themes deal with matters of family; memory and its disintegration; nostalgia; and the seasonal changes of my Midwestern surroundings. Each painting offers an opportunity to reckon with the world around me. Often, I discover within that reckoning a reflection of myself and my familial history.

Updates

I have been at Eureka as associate professor of art for about 10 years now and chair of the art and education division since getting tenure four years ago. I continue to make and show art both nationally and internationally. I am also still with my spouse who I met at EIU we have been married since just after graduation and just celebrated 21 years married.

Artist Statement

Sphere’s work explores the complicated relationship between virtual and physical objects, actions, and identities, giving concrete form to vague landscapes of networked activity. Sculptures, drawings, and installations portray a density and confusion along with structured beauty that toys with the notion of abstraction as encryption. The viewer or participant is offered a brief sense of agency, peppered with uncertainty, within the largely invisible systems of virtual financial currency, the dark web, global communications, or the environment.

Data is given physical form but our interactions with it also form an input output relationship. Interactions either in the past (web traffic) or present (movement around the room, breath adding to its co2) form an important aspect of Sphere’s work. The creation and collection of data is a uniquely human pursuit, but aside from its utility it is not regularly thought of as something aesthetic. Granting form to the data allows new ways to interact and think about not only its impact but our impact.

Elements of the interactions with the work also mirror play, like with Currency and the interactive game created with an adding machine, or with Flood-tide below me, I see you face to face, and movement translated to drawing in the classic planter toy of chia pets. Interaction and play can be an important part of viewers' interaction with the work and understanding of the often dark implications the data is divulging.

Artist Statement

I graduated EIU in 2018 with a degree in 2D art, and no idea what I wanted to do with it. Immediately after graduating, I left to teach English in Japan for 3 years, lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, for 3 months, then moved to Boston, where I worked in a Japanese/English preschool for a year, finally returning home in the summer of 2024. I came home to reconnect with my family, and to finally to pursue a career in Art Education. Since returning home, I’ve reconnected with my love of printmaking, which I’d discovered during my career at Eastern (thank you, Pocaro), and have been building my at-home lithography practice. 久しぶりに I’m home is my first print in years, etched with lemon juice and Pepsi, printed with the back of a plastic spoon. It depicts my aloe saponaria plant, native to South Africa, a stalwart companion who survived the cross-country move with me from Boston. Finally, both of us are putting down roots.

Updates

After graduating with my BA in Painting and Drawing from Eastern Illinois University, I attended The Art Institute of Chicago where I received a BFA in 2010 and an MFA in 2015.  Upon completion of a teaching fellowship, I relocated to Los Angeles where I currently live and continue to develop my work.

Artist Statement

I emerge from within a relational, atomized world and engage with the resistance of an impenetrable surface. Unseduced by certainty, my synthesis of gestural, figurative abstraction, the landscapes and iconography of video games and historical painting, coalesce into an infinitely unfolding and perpetually developing material reality; an autonomous architecture of the self.

Updates

I'm excited to share that I've recently moved into a new studio space in Brooklyn and am diving into a fresh body of work. I'm looking forward to exploring new directions and ideas in this next phase of my practice. I'll be sharing more details as the work develops.

Artist Statement

My process begins with scanning holographic paper—transforming light into image. The resulting chaotic, prismatic dispersion becomes a starting point for my analogue/digital hybrid compositions. By pushing the limits of image data, I develop a highly personal visual language that sits at the intersection of technology and traditional mark-making. I draw from the history of Color Field and Gestural painting, particularly in my engagement with gesture, surface, and scale. Working at an immersive, experiential scale allows me to create a physicality that is felt both by the viewer and by myself during the act of making. Part of my practice is driven by a search for a kind of technological sublime—a sensorial space where digital and material realities converge.

I use highly saturated color and repeated organic forms to evoke a visual language associated with the feminine and the narcotic. Curvilinear lines are masked, tapped out, and layered in acrylic; color echoes through the composition, producing subtle shifts and blur effects that mirror the image beneath. These moments invite improvisation, play, and painterly departures. In my titles I use associative language—fragments, characters, and digital syntax to evoke the immediacy of a browser command, the act of navigating a digital environment. These same symbols often appear within the paintings themselves, masked into the surface as part of the composition. Ultimately, my goal is to slow down the experience of virtual space and speed up the experience of painted space. Working fluidly across mediums, I am fascinated by the possibility of giving the virtual a tangible, sensory materiality.

Updates

After college I taught both painting and music privately while continuing to show my art until 2020 where I got to show some paintings at the Metro (Chicago music venue) and some other unconventional galleries right before Covid shut everything down. I eventually ended up running three music schools (School of Rock) in the Chicago area before moving to corporate where I now facilitate trainings to franchise owners and school managers in the US and internationally.

I have recently began creating and showing art again and am even taking a stained glass class which is absolutely fascinating.

Artist Statement

My art explores the relentless push and pull between order and disorder that defines my experience with ADHD. Each composition emerges from a collision of two opposing forces: the craving for structure—clean lines, geometric shapes, and intentional boundaries—against the persistent, intrusive chaos of distraction, impulse, and mental noise.

The angular planes and defined edges represent my desire to organize, to anchor thought in clarity. Yet they fracture and dissolve into bursts of color, texture, and movement—visual interruptions mirroring the way focus splinters under the weight of competing stimuli. The palette shifts between vibrant saturation and muted voids, evoking moments of hyperfocus and the inevitable drift into overwhelm.

My work is not about winning the battle between chaos and order, but about living in their constant negotiation. It’s about the tension in the space between, where control feels fleeting, but creativity thrives in the cracks. In embracing both structure and disorder, I find a visual language that reflects not only the struggle of ADHD, but also its unexpected beauty.

Updates

Since graduating from Eastern Illinois University two years ago, I have been pursuing my master's degree. This May, I earned a Master of Science in Medical Illustration from Augusta University. Currently, I am working as a contract medical illustrator in the Seattle, WA, area. As I move forward, I plan to continue pursuing my artistic and scientific passions to create accurate and beautiful work.

Artist Statement

Medical illustration is all about communication. As a medical illustrator, I am trained to create accurate aesthetic visuals in medical and biological sciences. I aim to create aesthetically appealing and accurate visuals. Driven by my passion and creativity, I empower students, educators, healthcare workers, and the general public. Bridging the education gap by simplifying complex topics into easily understood illustrations and animations.

Updates

At the moment, I am to go into my MFA thesis semester at Pennwest University in Edinboro, PA. After which, I plan to continue working in the field of ceramics and education, as my love of the two has not diminished since my time at EIU. In terms of my own art, my work has been inheriting the sensibilities of ceramics from abstract expressionism and the arts and crafts era in the 50s; my work has become less about personal history and more of a love for the nature of the material.

In all I am having a wonderful time and am excited to see where the next leg of my studio arts journey will lead!

Artist Statement

My current body of work explores the delicate boundary between naturalistic form and man-made construction. As I drive home, I am often struck by the earthworks around me—vast landscapes carved by human hands yet shaped by the inherent flow of nature. These earth cuts are scars on the earth that reveal a timeline of what was and what is now. I am enamored by that conversation that is held in that space. Nature heals the scars of humanity and evokes something I cannot totally see. The undeniable presence of the hand of humanity has influenced the shape of stone, sand, and soil, yet I do not at first sight see humanity’s touch. We obfuscate that line to veil the touch on man and allow nature to take Reigh of itself. That tension is where I see my work.

In my artistic practice, I seek to capture that same juxtaposition between spontaneity and hidden intentionality. The process of working with clay, wedging, folding, and tearing, is a conversation between the material and myself. As I manipulate the clay, I try to listen to the voice within it—the subtle way it responds to my touch, its own internal forces pushing back or guiding my hands. I am both an active participant and an observer, letting the clay's natural qualities emerge, while imposing my own intentions to create form.

Through this process, I aim to create a balance where human intervention fades into the natural flow of the material. It is my hope that the resulting work mirrors the same dialogue I see in the earthwork cuttings around me—where the trace of human influence quietly integrates with the inherent beauty of nature. As it stands, my work seeks to invoke how the play of human interaction can evolve into something that embodies both the spontaneous and the intentional. Finding the resonating factor that marries these ideas into something that is wholly my own. I seek to resolve these tensions between the natural and the crafted, between what is seen and what is felt.

Artist Statement

Recently I’ve been creating pieces that are centered around the struggle to regulate negative feelings and a desire to find peace. The paintings act as a personal form of therapy that references spaces in my imagination that I use to calm myself.

Updates

I've been teaching adjunct at the University of North Carolina Greensboro while exhibiting, participating in residencies, creating public art installations, and making custom light fixtures. My time in the U.S. is soon coming to a close as I am moving my life and art practice to Iceland!

Artist Statement

Growing up on a farm instilled in me a deep connection to the land that continues to define how I navigate the world. I learned early that expansiveness can take many forms: the endless Midwestern horizon, an erupting volcano, the shimmer of moonlight on the ocean, or the glow of a setting sun across a cornfield. These moments leave me spellbound, filled with the same involuntary expansion in my chest. A reminder that awe is as much a physical experience as it is an emotional one.

My practice is driven by a desire to explore whether this ineffable response to the natural world can ever be captured or recreated. Can the inexplicable wonder of the aurora borealis, the quiet immensity of the Milky Way, or the shimmer of the sun across water be simulated on a domestic scale? This question guides my research into light, material, and perception, tracing both primal instincts and contemporary compulsions. From cave paintings to cathedrals, from Monet to Ansel to Olafur, humans have always attempted to replicate nature’s phenomena. Today, we extend that impulse into the digital realm, archiving obsessively with phone cameras, uploading fragments of experience as proof, souvenir, or memory. Yet the irony remains: in our attempts to preserve the moment, we often miss it as it unfolds.

To probe this tension, I work primarily with dichroic film. This material splits visible light into shifting gradients of color, appearing transparent from one angle and mirrored from another. Its gem-like surface lures us in with sparkle, echoing the primal instinct to seek out the glint of water. Just as humans are evolutionarily drawn to shimmer in mica, rainbows, or opals, we are captivated by this material’s aliveness. By sewing, layering, illuminating, and shaping dichroic film into immersive installations, sculptural objects, and site-specific works, I explore how light itself can generate scale and volume, rather than relying on physical mass. At times, the work straddles the line between art and architecture: fragile films reimagining industrial beams, or hand-sewn forms reframing structural space. These contrasts mimic the dialogue of mountain and sea, earth and sky. Harmony found in difference.

Ultimately, my practice is an excavation of perception. The work lives in the thresholds between looking and seeing, hearing and listening, attention and awareness. It is consumed with questions: What instincts pull us toward shimmer and reflection? Why are we compelled to archive, to recreate, to hold onto what is fleeting? Can awe be distilled without being diminished?

I do not seek answers so much as spaces in between. Just as poetry exists between the question and the answer, I hope my work resides in that same in-between, where the ineffable can be felt, even if it cannot be captured.