I seek to express a sublime truth through trash, low technologies, and other base materials. While creating and installing I try to practice faithful surrender to the laws of chance, gravity, and materiality. I record my love affair with the sky through photographs, paintings, poems, and gigantic found fabric collage-like sculptures that droop from and cover ceilings. After years of living with depression, I have absurd and prescient comfort with death. This shows itself in my interest in dark topics entered playfully. Always interested in darkness and night; sleeping and waking and the dreaming in between is a consummate interest of mine. My paintings and photographs are always not quite solid, shifting in dim lighting, ghost forms appearing, and shadows obscuring. I am interested materially and conceptually in seams. The seams of clothing, quilts, houses, horizon, family, friendship, reality. I seek to isolate the location and gaps of seams - do we peak through to brilliant ecstasy or churning madness? What if we can’t recognize the difference?
I use symbols to reference a common vocabulary found in dreams, children’s books, and universal signage. Keys, Doors, Windows, Cats, Ladders, Flowers, Houses, Clocks, Dice. Recognizable symbols can be referenced and distorted to quickly convey a narrative. I use these forms in my paintings, and I create large versions of these symbols in sculpture. Recreating often purely representative, unusable versions of these objects, I return them back to the realm of ideas, back to the subconscious, and death.
I am deeply inspired by children’s books and poetry and use my own drawing and poetry to attempt to maintain a presence. I compose my color palettes through observation and study of trash, sorting through the gorgeous items that have failed us in some way. I know what it’s like to be thrown out, I pick them up and let them know that what has failed is also free.
Artists they talk to include; Ree Morton, Ursula K Le Guin, Casey Plett, Phylida Barlow, Octavia Butler, Hilda Af Klimt, Yvonne Rainer, Lydia Davis, NK Jemisin, Samuel Delany, M. Tellez, Nicole Claveloux, T. Fleishman and Shirley Jackson.