Statement: My current work explores Southern identity through painting and sculpture. Though I’m always interested in figurative language, the original thought of crows and citrus developed from a memory I have of my mother’s kitchen (an Audubon print of crows hanging above a bowl of oranges) and a series I painted last year of interiors, citrus, and kitchen vessels.The phrase “As the Crow Flies” conveniently includes my interest in Southern phraseology and seemed appropriate for the literal flight of the birds as seen in my mobiles. Because I developed the sculptures and paintings simultaneously I chose to work the paint in a similar way to the process of painting the aluminum, taping off sections of flat color and sanding significantly.The weightlessness of painting based on patterns also emulated the play with gravity in the mobiles. All in all I tried to open myself to working in a way that encouraged the cross pollination of my painting and sculpture processes- with color based sculpture assembly and tactility based paint application.