I wrote an artists statement
I wrote it because I had to but I’m glad it did
It goes like this:
By combining textile techniques, printmaking techniques, hard sculpture and biological practices, I create objects that interrogate the boundary between disgust and beauty. I am interested in the anxiety of the inadequate container. This is an anxiety I believe to be at the core of human experience, of exaltation and repulsion. A genetic mutation affords me an intimate understanding of decay, rupture, and repair. I am especially interested in the beauty of decay, the patina of use, the palimpsest of scars.
I do not seek to make adequate containers, but to materially explore the story that container inadequacy tells about death, love, and anxiety. I make objects that function as vessels, or proof, that weave softness with hardness both in concept and material.
Questions I seek to answer:
-What are the edges of our containers (containers = bodies, lives, minds, hearts, experiences)?
-How do we experience and expand those edges?
-Are those edges mutable?
-Who does an image belong to?
-What does an image contain?
-Can an image, or material, be manipulated to contain more/less?
-How does rupture and repair change our containers?
-Can rupture and repair be choreographed/manipulated to show us more about our container's shape?
-What happens if Death is treated not as a boundary but as a raw material?
-If decay is the architect of the boundary of death, what else can decay build
Tools I use to seek this answer:
-practice, repetition
-research (consumption and integration)
-orchestrated corruption (through decay/destruction)
-manipulation, degradation, exploitation of the image/material
-rupture and repair, of the image/material
-molding, casting, making the negative of
-cultivation, of insects, fungi, their habitats,
-collaboration (with time, materials, images)
-harvesting and scavenging, of raw material from my own body, from my surroundings,
-husbandry (of insects, materials, containers, practices)