Artist Statement

          As an interdisciplinary artist with a practice founded in inventive material exploration, the use of object-making has become a method of translation and transference of somatic trauma and human experience. My interest in the natural sciences and history coupled with a focus on the tactile, handmade, and corporeal in my sculptures and installations I hope grounds and renders my conceptual work into an earthbound and bodied experience for the viewer. Employing a wide range of mediums, I work with experimental and ephemeral materials such as biodegradable plastics and fibers, growth cultures, gels, earth, ash, food products and natural glues, as well as with more traditional and archival materials such as bronze, aluminum, and glass. In my approach to material, and in my practice as a whole, I try to balance a desire for technical mastery with allowances for intuitive working and the opportunities that arise from mistakes and the unexpected. 

          While discovering the properties and language of materials, and through their manipulation and treatment, I try to express ideas and themes of permanence and impermanence, decay, the effect of pain on the mind and body, epigenetics, cultural and personal concepts of memorialization, and an appreciation of the earth and human body as well as the connections between their different manifestations of trauma. My practice is informed by immersive installations, post-Minimalism, environmental concerns, process invention, proto-Feminist artists, light, texture, and ideas of subjective memory. Research, investigation, and creation of new materials is integral to my practice, with an especial focus on emerging advances in sustainability. Conceptually, recently my work has turned toward the more vulnerable experiences of existing as a woman and mother, and finding the ability to effectively translate some of these experiences through form and material is one of the artistic goals that I hope to continue to strive toward creatively.

          Although many of the themes in my artwork are distilled and expressed through the lens of my singular experience, as a reserved person, I intuitively attempt to counterbalance these personal revelations with a natural restraint. Maintaining a thin veil between myself and the viewer, the line between disclosure and privacy is something I feel I am often testing. I question how objects can be exploited to speak to the our human condition, the frailty, brokenness, ephemerality, and innate pathos of a lives lived within each of our single bodies and experiences,