Each composition brings together individual floral portraits, creating conversations that reflect the relationships we form throughout our lives. Together they speak to connection, distance, support, love, loss, and the countless ways our lives intersect.

Each portrait is constructed from fragments of book pages, where typography and language become both material and metaphor. Books hold stories, memories, imagination, and inherited knowledge. Embedded within each bloom, these fragments suggest the experiences that shape an individual over a lifetime. Some words remain visible while others disappear beneath layers of encaustic, much like the moments that become part of us without always remaining fully in view.

As the portraits emerge from richly layered encaustic surfaces, they dissolve the boundary between painting and sculpture. Their titles are drawn from the flowers that inspired them, creating a poetic connection between the written word and the natural world. Through Novel Blooms, I celebrate the stories that shape our individual lives and the relationships that connect us.