The earlier, more analytic impulse was to use very rational but kind of absurd techniques or tendencies—mapping, charting, and architecture—to try and make sense of who I was in my time and space and political environment. But there’s only so much truth to a theoretical understanding of something.

You're not just this person who's from your own specific experiences, but the collective experience of what makes you who you are because of time.

I always wanted to be an artist, but I didn't really know how someone could make a life out it.

The erasure itself became the action. It seemed to suggest a moment in terms of how sad or pessimistic you can feel in a political environment or a historical situation. But it felt like a really hopeful gesture in the painting.

That's what I'm interested in: the space in between, the moment of imagining what is possible and yet not knowing what that is.

The investigation of making is illuminating towards that moment rather than the other way around, a reversal of the way that I would approach making a painting before. I think that it gets to a richer illumination of the moment, which is what I was trying to do at the beginning but going about it a little backwards.

When you're not a mom, you can get up in the middle of the night, paint, sleep all morning... you can't do that when you have two children!