The figure has always been a ghost in my work, an ever present shadow. I thought I had tamped it down, repressed it in graduate school, only to paint work with monolithic objects and decomposing architecture. I created expansive landscapes bursting with remnants of the built environment. Intent on chasing down human impact while doing my best to ignore any thread of narrative. Over time this specter loomed large, filled the lungs of animal witnesses to chaos .  Now nothing is repressed.  The work shifted to include adaptive celebratory creatures, fanciful sculptures.  Human presence, hinted at, long prominent in its absence, is now explicit, the human form welcomed back into the raucous bestiary of my imagined worlds.