Artist Statement

Artist Statements...

Shorter 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 a 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 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. 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. The care and attention I give to each material and layer of 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.

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 exist as a visual and formal distillation of my experience of the aged architectural structures 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.

Longer Statement:

I create abstracted modular sculptures, assemblages, and collages that playfully reference utility, using a wide range of salvaged materials and carefully fabricated objects. I also maintain a practice as a ceramic sculptor and potter. I am interested in the language of the vessel and embrace how layers of form and texture can be built with the clay and glaze materials. My pottery is largely concerned with turning the experience I have making sculptures, and what inspires them, into a visual and tactile experience that can be a part of the home in a very different way than other art forms. My work, both pottery and sculpture, prioritizes composition with an emphasize on form, color, and texture. I create architectural ceramic forms that use curvilinear volumes and exaggerated proportions to create an engaging sense of tension and dynamism. My work creates a visual narrative of the pieces being built up and broken down simultaneously. 

The sculptures I create exist to tell stories. I considerately compose my sculptures using my own sensibility of formal language, elevating the materials with a determined focus on how each disparate part connects to the next to create a whole. I have a reverence for all of the objects and materials I use, no matter their origin, and consider how each of their forms, textures, colors, weights and other formal qualities integrate into a whole. By using materials in unexpected ways and many materials that may not usually be considered “art materials” in holistic pieces and as a greater approach to creating work as an artist, I am dismantling or flattening material hierarchy. My intention is for this to lead the viewer to reconsider the world around them and to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, ignored, and/or abject. With the use of recognizable utilitarian objects or components the sculptures take on an implied function. The work creates a space for the viewer to pay attention, and to really consider what they are seeing. The work is centered around the idea of agency and the vitality in seeing potential in the abject. This agency is displayed by the figure of the ragpicker, the djobbeur, and the bricoleur as tropes of reclamation resonate deeply with me. These figures take action with urgency in the face of adversity. I understand these figures as timeless, their responses to reality perpetually relevant in our world and my own as an individual with consistent experiences of trauma, and adversity. I do see myself as a bricoleur, though I know that I do not live with the level of deprivation that these historical figures did.  

My work often takes off from the interactions I have with decaying architecture, that I collect, record, and treasure. I feel a similar sense of urgency, desperation, and adaptation in these architectural structures as I do in both the process of my work, and the actions of the ragpicker 1, djoubbeur 2, and bricoleur 3. These structures, held up solely by determination, clinging to the last shreds of life, provide moments of reciprocal buoyancy. Starting from my chest to my toes, my whole body feels the built-up textures in these all but inadvertent compositions with their once whole windows and rusty hinges. Their precarious existence is mirrored by that of the physically and visually balanced sculptures in my work, the reality of relationships, and the stability of life. The accumulation of decay is a form of growth and comfort is found in how these structures and I rest in our ability to crumble. I might be one of few to spend time considering these homes and sheds but the beauty, solace, and resonance they give me in return is ineffable. The sense of wonder, captivation, and compassion I feel when getting to know these structures echoes what I experience as I interact with, learn from, and care for people as a teacher, caregiver, friend, and fellow human.

1 A ragpicker or chiffonnier is someone who makes a living by collecting and salvaging refuse materials and scraps of cloth left in the streets.

2 Translates to day laborer, historically a person living/working on a plantation who would carry out handyman jobs on plantation as the people living there needed, using what they had available.

3 Bricolage means a (in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things. The bricoleur is someone who uses a wide range of available things to create something. Bricoleur translates to handyman in French.