Having grown up drawing and reading—in a visual environment dominated by comic books, black-and-white Hollywood movies, and garish religious art—I decided to become a writer. Since then I have made a series of shifts: from Adelaide, Australia, to New York City, where I completed my formal education with a doctorate in literature from Columbia University; from literature to the new field of queer studies, within which I have written and teach at Sarah Lawrence College; and from writing to making art.
I always tell my students to pay attention to the details, if you want to see what you are looking at and hear what is being said. As an artist I lack credentials, do politics at the office, have no spiritual aspirations, and am unmoved by poststructuralist theory. I am (unfortunately for me and mine) terrible at joy. But I pay attention to details.
I now have a wider frame of aesthetic reference, from the histories of Japanese prints, Chinese scrolls, and Islamic textiles and ceramics, to the twentieth century of Malevich and Klee, Anni and Josef Albers, Agnes Martin, Lygia Pape, and Bridget Riley. In my twenty-first century practice I work by hand (painting and printing), on paper (French sheets, Japanese rolls, machine-made in America), and through aggregation (of methods, blocks, shapes, sheets). Though I often multiply, I rarely duplicate. Always, I move color through geometries, and color and geometries through space. Everything begins with a drawing.