Statement

Family homes are fascinating microcosms. In these spaces, generational and individual aesthetic tastes are woven into the shared environment. Each piece of decor, furniture, and clothing overtly and covertly contribute to a collective story about values, relationships and evolving memories. Material gifts and passed down heirlooms attempt to convey what words can’t, but eventually the meanings get lost or changed.

I collect discarded and displaced objects from within these spaces in order to transform them into sculptures that reflect the complex nature of family history and identity formation. My materials come from curbside piles in my neighborhood, and bags of miscellaneous stuff that have been passed on by friends who are actively decluttering. It seems the act of separating these items out from the trash acknowledges that they have inherent, but not personal, worth. To honor this, I integrate fragments of these unwanted things into new configurations and environments where they collaboratively embody the ever-shifting intricacy of human lives. I laboriously deconstruct, manipulate, and layer fragments and surfaces from these outcasts and re-envision them as vibrant and fluid biomorphic forms that may feel simultaneously alien and familiar.

The forms I create allude to the schism that lies between our inner desires and our external realities. For example, I combine once-sentimental things like holiday decorations, stuffed animals, handmade afghans, and old sweaters, with everyday functional things like toothpicks, buttons, sponges, and window screen into complexly entangled forms. Some appear to be masses of vines and tentacles that self-protect and embrace, but also self-isolate and smother. Others are whimsical swirling clusters of soft, shiny, and sharp elements. They resemble airborne particulates and microbes, alluding to things we have inherited or internalized and are beyond our control or consciousness. Architectural forms that resemble makeshift shrines or altars relate to my innate desire for wonder and transcendence in spite of a cynical view of the capitalist monotheistic culture.

Throughout all of the work, there is an allusion to the passage of time and the inevitability of change through imagery of decomposition, regrowth, and calcification.