This piece is called Hypnopompia which I began to work on at the end of Feb 2020 and finished in August 2020 for a two person show with artist Jessica Jane Julius called “Between the Edge of Reflection” at Traver Gallery in 2021. It features the characters in my paintings and serves as an environment for them to live in safely in “Reverie Forest” (an ongoing subject in my artwork). I used found objects, blown glass, fabric, and mixed media. The objects I use are ones I have been collecting for decades.

I named the installation after a state I felt like I was living in during Pre-vaccination Covid Winter. I had really spent most of the pandemic leading up to that time feeling pretty safe in my comfortable home and fortunate to be alive and have all of my loved ones just a phone call away. Like a lot of people, I went into the darkness of that Winter and felt inspired to make this new work. Things felt blurry and dark when I began this installation and I started to feel like I was waking up from a dream from the early days of covid. I started to research the state between dreaming and waking up which is called the Hypnopompic State where people can have auditory, visual and sensory touch hallucinations. This resounded with me and therefore after some really beautiful events and some dark events that happened in my personal life at the time, I decided to start looking at that period as a hallucination as a way to move past it.

It began as a place to house the characters in my paintings, then turned into a love letter to someone who woke me up a little bit at the time and opened my heart and then it turned into a place to escape to and find peace.