Party Favors represents a new direction in my series ‘Portraits of Women as Trees.’ This pollarded tree, with its meaty branches and dense sprouting suckers, said to me: excess, hedonism, entanglement. Compared to the grounded and (mostly) solitary figures/trees in previous work, I saw in this tree a raunchy party in action, where the female figures balance naivety and worldliness, assurance and surrender, reality and fantasy. Party Favors was also inspired in part by artists Anna Park and Enrico Robusti.