The Dark Field: A Personal Mythology is a narrative collection of forty dark-field monotypes through which I give visible form to a private mythology shaped by memory, grief, bloodlines, feminine interiority, and survival.

 Its recurring women, children, strange animals, sunken forests, swords, fires, and black suns draw the deeply personal into conversation with older forms of mythic storytelling.

 The physical process of dark-field monotype closely mirrors the emotional process of memory retrieval from which this works emerges. I begin by covering a plate completely in ink. I then wipe, drag, soften, and remove that ink until an image emerges. I do not place these figures into darkness. I recover them from it.

This process depends upon a tension between intention and accident. Coming from the precision and control of block printing, I find the unpredictability of this medium both infuriating and appropriate. I can guide the image, but I cannot control what the ink retains, what it releases, or what occurs when the plate passes through the press. This uncertainty allows the material to participate in the act of revelation.

 With a few exceptions that I did not yet understand, my earlier printmaking was more illustrative, while poetry and visual art existed largely as separate practices. Following my 2024 solo exhibition Neon Pastoral at The Studios of Key West, I stepped away from visual art for nearly two years. I had grown restless with my previous process, and the reception of my poetry book intensified my desire to go deeper visually. During that interval, the imagery that would become The Dark Field began developing.

In retrospect, the construction of the Neon Pastoral exhibition anticipated the transformation that followed. I made those works by cutting linocut images apart and rearranging their fragments into new compositions. Afterward, my visual practice underwent a similar dismantling.

The Dark Field represents the marriage of my two practices. I returned to visual art not to make individual illustrations, but to reveal a sustained mythology with recurring figures and emotional continuity.

These figures arrive through dreams and poetry writing. Lark, for example, first came to me in childhood and was the self I addressed in poems written in the ledgers of my schoolbooks.  Animals, celestial bodies, weapons, and remnants of fairytales recur as guardians, omens and stand-ins for me.

Though the narrative is not linear, the work moves from fear to ferocity, darkness to transformation, and survival to initiation. It is a way of mythologizing a life, not by making that life grander or less true, but by creating a structure in which a difficult story can find form and meaning.

 I want the work to create recognition before explanation: the feeling of encountering something unknown that is somehow intimately familiar. The figures do not carry fixed meanings; viewers may enter through their own memories and recognize their losses, protectors, transformations, and hidden stories within mine: I know this girl. I have lost this crown. Something like this wolf has walked beside me.