Artist Statement
My work is empowered by intuition and imagination and is based in storytelling. I build sculptures and pottery using a strong compositional and formal sensibility as my guide. My practice as an interdisciplinary artist making modular sculpture engages in thought processes that deploy forms of reclamation. My assemblages emphasize potential as a form of agency and
vitality. Potential is held in the salvaged materials, fragmented tools or functional objects, and fabricated components I collect, create and construct with. I imagine a new collaborative life with these parts, using them to fill needs within the whole of a sculpture. Similarly, I approach composition in a wholistic manner when making pottery. I enjoy working within the parameters
that making pots provides. With a focus on slab building and layered surfaces, the pots I make engage the viewer with emotive depth in texture and composition. Slab building allows me endless opportunities for nuance and form. Making pots is pleasantly repetitive and leaves room for me to explore different ways I can tell a visual story using the different compositional and
material choices I layer.
A sense of urgency and play exists within the sculptures and pottery I make. Within my modular sculptures, precarious relationships and implied function create and reinforce moments of familiarity and play. This type of tension and balance show up in the way I combine organic and rigid formal qualities and the dynamic use of color in my pots. Ceramics and the care and attention required of the material will always be at the core of my practice. I am able to construct pots that preserve my love of process and hand building with exposed seems and enhanced surface texture. The attention I give to each material and layer in my work is a declaration of value. My work hinges on inviting people to think differently about materials, forms, and their function. Ideally, this alternative way of thinking leads a viewer to rediscover their own reality and what they pay attention to.
Often my work takes off from moments of experiencing decaying architectural structures. Their details directly inform my work and are often repeated and abstracted in the surfaces and forms of my pots. These moments exist as space for reciprocal moments of buoyancy. These architectural structures and I, skinned in emotive layers of texture, carry our aging is a record. Suspended in time we float, embracing the volume, and weight of what has been built up and broken down. This accumulation, a form of growth. We exist with the ability to crumble, grasping at final shreds of life. These moments become a unit of my survival that can be mobilized in my studio. My pots and mixed media sculptures exist as emotional, visual, and formal distillations (my pots) or explorations (my sculptures) of my experience of these aged architectural structures and functional objects, like tools, I find so beautiful.
In positions of desperation and urgency we can be driven to work with our reality, imagining a new existence for the abject. When faced with a state of loss, ruin, scarcity, and/or oppression, our tenacity to adapt, reach, grab, and rebuild is miraculous and almost incomprehensible. There is wonder and desperation in what becomes a building block and where we find material and immaterial bricks to lay.
