Statement

I consider myself an interdisciplinary artist and I work with the media that best suits a particular idea. I make drawings, sculptures, installations, interactive pieces, audio, video, and text pieces. Much of my past body of work looks at ideas around usefulness, value, and perception. I considered what people value and how social systems affect perception of value. In 2019 I was diagnosed with breast cancer and subsequently went through intensive treatment. That experience had a profound impact on my life and the topics I consider most important to look at in my work. After going through and recovering from a serious illness, I have become particularly interested in ideas around the building of hopes and dreams, illness, loss, and isolation.

My earlier work considers questions like what constitutes usefulness and how perception of usefulness relates to trends in ways of thinking. I tried to examine these questions through the objects we produce and our relationships to them. The project Remnants includes sculptures, some of them interactive, and an image collection. The interactive pieces incorporate physical computing using Arduino to interact either with parts of their environment or with human participation. Remnants focuses on the contemporary work environment where usefulness and value play out both in terms of the value of work to an employee and the utility of that employee within the work setting. Remnants looks at the emotional and psychic remnants of the workday carried home. Pillows 1-5 is an interactive work that references both domestic and work environments with a throw pillow form and business casual fabric. Pillows 2, 3, and 5 react to pressure, playing audio when pressed. Pillow 2 plays notification sounds while Pillows 3 and 5 are narrative audio works, one speaking excerpts from books on management, the other reading a redacted corporate email chain. When a viewer sits down and leans against one of the audio pillows they hear fragments of the audio, much like the sensation of attempting to relax after work, with fragments of stressors playing in the background of the mind. Work Shirt and Work Shirt 2 reference tedious, mundane work. Work Shirt plays ambient typing sounds in reaction to the breeze from an oscillating fan and Work Shirt 2 demonstrates the physical evidence of labor through embroidery details following the pattern of the vacation-aspirational fabric it is sewn from.

My current project is called Poison Cut Burn. Having cancer and the experience of going through treatment and recovery touched every part of my life and identity. I am thankfully now in better health, and I have begun trying to untangle what this experience means. It has prompted me to consider my own hopes, dreams, losses, and sense of isolation. I am thinking more deeply about where my own expectations for my life come from, what is passed down generationally or absorbed through social interactions. The essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” by the philosopher Judith Butler about performing gender has stuck with me for years. In it, Butler discusses how gender is taught and repeated. You do not have to look far to see examples of this - children’s clothing, toys, designed spaces, etc. I turned in part to childhood and lineage to try to understand where my hopes for my life came from and how they have been reinforced.

A childhood dollhouse with all of the complicated connections to feminine aspirations and problematic symbolism is one axis of this project. There is a large-scale drawing, and others in the works, that expand the house out of proportion. It is large, but not large enough to inhabit. In another series of small scale drawings, I am documenting each item belonging to the house. There is a two channel video installation to be projected on opposing walls. One section of footage shows the dollhouse in the middle of a yard during a snowstorm. The house slowly accumulates snow at the edges of the rooms and on the roof as the background turns from afternoon to night. The second part of footage is my hand holding and burning an image of my torso after radiation treatment. The video is visceral, and I think of it as the key that connects the house to my bodily experience. Other drawings use homes that belonged to members of my family of different generations as somewhat literal stand-ins for bodies, connected by blood in the form of surgical drains. I see the homes as forms that both protect, sometimes ineffectively, and isolate.