My work is about loss.
Rebecca Solnit once wrote that we are constantly losing throughout our lives – keys, earrings, notes, jobs, friendships, people – and that in this loss, we find the richness of human experience. I believe that an artist’s job is to be honest about the world and how we exist in it, telling the truth about the beauty, heartbreak, despair, and joy that make up our days. I hope that my work prompts thoughtfulness, reflection, curiosity, and a deep, abiding feeling of connection and beauty.
I try to create these conditions through exploring my own experiences as touchpoints for common feelings and happenings in our lives – feelings and happenings like the overarching loss brought about by the passage of time, the desire to preserve fleeting moments and emotions, and the resonant freedom and fear we feel in the face of wild, open, unregulated places.
I believe there is something of the spiritual, or of unseen powers in things that lay off-the-grid, outside places of reason and data and control, and beyond the safe, manicured spaces that our society tries to convince us to stay within. I choose to reference outdoor spaces, local lore, and family histories. I also work with references to an era and place of material culture that held a strong tradition of handcrafts, self-sufficiency, community ties, and knowledge that could only be embodied physically, not simply studied in books (much less on a screen).
I often make work that has representational content, but that content exists as a sign or stand-in for a bigger conceptual approach to what I create. The things I make are deeply ingrained in our very human longings, our inner worlds, and the narratives we construct throughout our lives. My creations are also very carefully made, caringly constructed, and delicately, subtly presented. By doing this, I want my viewers to take time with the works I make, become intimate with them, and get to know them better. Hopefully, that experience stirs something deeper than the surface alone could.
Exploration. Emotion. Intangible ties. Quiet questions and wonderings. These are all present in the things I make, in an effort to capture and hold the fleeting nature of our most common experiences – the daily moments that make up our lives. In our world, we often deny the unguaranteed tomorrow. But I believe in using the good dishes often, making cakes for no reason, and holding each other close as we pass through that world together. These little ceremonies of our days, made special through my treatment of them as subject matter, held tight through documentation despite their daily loss, and never quite capturing the original experience (only shadows of it) – that is the heart of the work I make.
