STATEMENT OF WORK

I work as a sculptor, fabricator, and small scale arts organizer and administrator. I am the sole proprietor of anhelo anhelo, a multifaceted project that provides production support to artists, organizes community projects, publishes artist books and anthologies, and uplifts the efforts of other individual artists, creative community practitioners and urban farmers, locally in Detroit and nomadically. I believe in a generous relationship to authorship when collaborating.

I make poems, castings, vessels and durational installations with biodegradable materials, and organize immersive and cooperative, community-centered public installations. My practice incorporates intimate collaboration, the performative act of public process, writing, and ephemera into its presentation and these are an equal part of the work.

My work is formal, concerned with light, texture and slowness, it emphasizes interactions between materials and the ways their environments act upon them. I am concerned with care, tenderness, and loss. With permeability, in the sense of learning. I am comfortable with exposing the process and labor: an open exchange of information. I use simplicity to denote sincerity, sometimes as easy as a wing nestled within an egg shell, or as laborious as forming a couple thousand pounds of concrete one handful at a time.

The shapes I build have a likeness to their surrounding architecture or landscape, in material, form or texture. They make use of the natural movement of water, or wind through the space they take up. I’m attracted to sticky, stretchy and squishy materials with which I can empathize, bodily. I consider the totality of material required to make a work, all of the pieces that get thrown away, the tools to build it. The importance of the piece must outweigh the waste it produces.