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Artist Statement ​

 

I define my practice through touch, labor, impulse, and damage control. The only constants in my studio are: something will need to be fixed, something will be lost, and I will regret gluing those things together. My approach to object making is informed by my selfish desire to create something that lasts while simultaneously expecting that it might not. The chaos of thought, tool, action, and raw material is structured only by hyper-focus on material intimacy and interest craft tradition and its ties to my biological, adoptive, and gender-based identity. 

 

I choose to work with materials that can withstand touch at its most aggressive and sensitive to the delicate. I am drawn to the familiarity of clay and wood histories in everyday spaces and their roles as objects of protection, desire, productivity, and violence. Clay is wet, messy, sexual, and temperamental. It has a fast memory for urgent gesture, but a slow path to permanence. It will shatter. The plywood and scrap wood is abundant, confident, predictable, and tough. It can be re-sawn, reglued, re-sanded, and repurposed at any point in its life. It is a leech of force and energy. It is resilient. Both clay and wood have touch memories – they will warp, move, and crack based on the tension endured in their material lives. Through shaping, carving, and sanding, I am negotiating with the material to remember my touch. Material investigation informs ideas of my own connection to labor as a measure of value, privilege to create, and object permanence in an increasingly digital and impersonal culture. 

 

Attention is a rare commodity for me. The absence of attention is its most tangible form. It is most abundant when it is directed towards the wrong thing. In my experience, that takes the form of a peculiar but familiar object, a shoddy DIY fix, an awkward-overly-specific device, and a quirky habit between thing and human. Using this as inspiration, I am interested in creating tangible form out of the void of attention by devoting space and time to explore the strange fragments of these objects and their idiosyncrasies. Abstraction is less a pursuit and more of a consequence of material translation, attention to tactility, and the focus of modularity over familiarity. As the fragmented parts accumulate, modularity between part and the whole takes precedence over loyalty of the original object. The significance of the sculpted object is defined by what it is doing- how it is affecting, supporting, and responding to another- rather than what it resembles. 

 

Modularity is the solution to embracing error and allowing for fluctuation of focus within my process. Using furniture joinery techniques and tension instead of more permanent connections like hardware or screws, I am able to create forms with bodily presence using only small, scrap material that can be easily disassembled and reassembled, and most importantly, moved and manipulated on my own. The work is built to come apart. It is made with the idea that it will need to change. It will need to be adapted to a new location. The avoidance of permanent joinery is a rejection of certainty and commentary about the spatial, material, and stereotypical constraints at play as the artist. By exposing the joinery and leaving some voids unfilled, I seek to consider the less than obvious types of joints– haphazard, temporary, or secure- that make up our own constructions of identity and perception of wholeness. 

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