I collect and deconstruct discarded and displaced objects from within domestic spaces—some retrieved from curbside “free” piles in my neighborhood, others passed on by friends who are decluttering—and transform them into swirling sculptures that combine fragments of familiar surfaces and synthesize them to create new environments where these misfits and outcasts can either compete with each other or collaboratively flourish.
I’m particularly fascinated by family homes as microcosms of identity—spaces where generational and individual aesthetics are woven into the shared environment, each piece of decor, furniture, and clothing overtly and covertly contributing to a collective story about values, relationships and evolving memories.By combining fragments of once-sentimental, but now unwanted, things like broken holiday decorations, heirloom textiles, forgotten toys, and worn-out sweaters, with mass-produced decorative and disposable, functional things like cocktail swords, plastic ribbon, and colorful sponges into forms that are densely layered, lively, and entangled, I allude to the complexity of a person’s being and the experiential realm between the inner world and the external reality.
For instance, many forms I create relate to various complex, but unseen internal sensations attached to emotional experiences- such as those that appear to be made of encircling vines that both self-protect and isolate, and embrace and self-smother. Some are whimsical convoluted clusters of soft, shiny, and sharp elements, that resemble airborne particulates, or microorganisms, alluding to things we have inherited, internalized, or are beyond our comprehension or control. Other forms resemble makeshift shrines or altars, relating to social-cultural systems of designated values and materialism. Although made from recycled objects, all of my sculptures appear to be teeming with life, mirroring the shifting nature of memory, which morphs with each recall, spurred by unexpected sensory encounters and constantly mutating over time.