STATEMENT OF WORK

In my work the concept is the materials and the content is the handling of those materials. The work is about color, tactility, flexible surfaces, sensual intelligence, experiences of space. It’s about unexpected material collisions and unlikely physical relationships. It’s about engaging with history while rebelling against convention. And always my work is about visible labor and difficult pleasure, about essential decoration and excessive functionality.

I make tactile and open-ended objects that freely cross back and forth between disciplines and that adapt to different locations or contexts, with no fixed mode of display. My process is an intuitive collaboration between me and the emerging piece in an open-ended experiment to arrive in an unexpected place. The process — like the work itself — is stubborn, optimistic, democratic. The work succeeds when it surprises me. I want it to talk back, to assert itself as an equal.

The “Rounds” and “Rays” series are about the materials and processes that produce them. Each piece takes a 16-step process of alternately cutting and sewing and painting layers of industrial felt, muslin, and canvas. The shape, the seams, and the fields of color are immediately visible. Other parts of the process are subtle, like the lines of stitching and the curving lines in the underpaintings. But every single step is ultimately visible. This accumulation of labor focusing equally on the support and the painted surface is a non-hierarchical collaboration between myself and the different materials.