*FREE PRINT: 10″x8″ signed giclée print on watercolor paper of “Love and Water Brought Back Her Strength”

Deep Memory: Mysteries Beneath the Surface

These abstract encaustic paintings speak to the layered, unstable, and ever-shifting nature of remembrance. Like images glimpsed beneath water’s surface, memories drift between clarity and obscurity yet lingering in our hearts and minds. This series treats memory not as a fixed narrative, but as a living, fluid process constantly reconstructed through acts of layering, erasing, obscuring, and revealing.

To inspire my abstract imagery, I captured glimpses of life beneath bodies of water with an underwater camera and spent hours observing submerged worlds in aquariums and on snokeling trips in Hawaii. These fluid natural environments became metaphors for the submerged, veiled, ever-changing layers of memory.  I also have had personal experience of the effects of memory loss while caring for my father who faced the slow unraveling of dementia. In this body of work, I am combining both the conceptual with the visual of how memory is both fragile and persistent, a force that both connects and eludes us.

Working in encaustic—a medium of molten beeswax, pigment, and fire—I build surfaces that reflect memory’s shifting nature. Each translucent layer conceals and exposes traces beneath, much like the mind’s selective recall. Drawing on traditions of surrealism, abstraction, and collage, these works explore how texture, form, and symbol become pathways into personal and collective memory. In this way, the act of painting becomes both excavation and preservation and honoring memory’s complexity and its power to haunt, transform, and connect. Each piece reflects a fragment of a larger emotional tide and asks a simple question. “What do we choose to hold, and what must we let drift away?”

(Large format paintings in this series will be released Jan. 1, 2026)