STATEMENT OF WORK

The things I knot, weld, twist and knead together reflect my interest in the symbolic inversion of familiar domestic objects—in those moments when action and reaction give things meaning, when the sacred transfers onto secular objects and how those meaningful things are used to tell stories of the past, present and future. My forms follow storytelling; My materials and techniques are grounded in vernacular culture; My adornments suggest identity, stories and beliefs. Their existence is to challenge how stories are told.

I read through current scholarly works, histories, archives, folklore and mythologies that cross cultures in an attempt to untangle disparate stories of the past and connect them with events and moments in today’s body politic. I consider what is not or chosen not to be written and what past writings could have been destroyed with intention or accidentally. I piece together bits of information with the goal to find links between the current marginalized groups—women, LGBTQ+, people of color and others—with established historical western writings, folklore and fairy tales meant to demonize and dehumanize said groups. I let my work tell their stories not directly told in those writings but lay in the inbetweenness of those words and redress stories that seem to have been maliciously misremembered, erased or morphed over time and distances. By critically reexamining and calling attention to these and their stories, I use the past to connect us with the present to remember how we tell our stories for the future.