ARTIST STATEMENT

The Levant tradition of predicting the future as fortune telling through coffee grounds is known as Tabseer. This has been a means to gather Levant women in the role of storytellers; to act as agents of self-determination in the present and future narratives. From the beginning the figures and lines left by the coffee have struck me as a magical poetry of happenstance, which has grown into an admiration and recognition of an unintentionally formed art. Just as coffee grounds inspire fortunes, the repetitive process of the artwork creates unique accidents celebrated as patterns and shapes through examination and repetition. Whether it is the physical properties of how the coffee grounds expand and dissipate or the reactionary manipulation of the material performed by spilling, painting, splashing, or throwing, I am able to exploit the nature of coffee and develop a seemingly arbitrary composition which resemble the shapes left in the Tabseer cups.