STATEMENT OF WORK

I live in a dense urban environment, but I am surrounded by a fascinating natural world that reveals itself more and more when I stop to pay attention to it. I am inspired by the forms, colors, textures, and patterns of nature as well as the architectural structures and surfaces around me. I work with these sources to create abstract wall-mounted sculptural “drawings” in wood. The work exists in two groups: linear Wall Drawings and compact plywood and wood Mosaics.

The Wall Drawings speak of weight, balance, tension, and fragility, echoing our precarious environmental and social situations. I construct the forms by hinging multiple lengths of wood together with wooden pins. The lines curve into shapes that hang off the wall or drape along the floor, creating unique gestures as they pull towards the earth. The hinges add an element of the mechanical to the organic shapes they create. The most recent pieces also include branches, which appear as natural prosthetics attached to the pieces of finished wood; an attempt to restore a mechanized material to its original state.

The Mosaics reference architectural forms, combining a sense of the intimate and the monumental. They are inspired by the variations in plywood edge patterns, which remind me of the markings of different types of birds. The overall shapes draw from architectural and design history, suggesting arched doorways, brick walls, opaque mirrors, or buildings from above. They collapse surface and space, alternately implying a frontal or overhead view of familiar structures, although never resolving into one interpretation.