STATEMENT OF WORK

My work tends to follow contradicting ideas about our relationship to material and the Earth. In what might be the most universal experience of craftwork, I enjoy the feeling of being guided by a material toward what feels like an inevitable artifact. At the same time, an equal dedication to unintentionality and the results of playful invention ties my work to long lineages of individual people and the idiosyncrasies that make up material culture across millennia. Over the past 10 years of working with the ancient medium of clay, my practice tries to explore new ground while connecting to this root of craft’s ability to reliably uncover new language and responses to representation, function, and tradition.

Though traditional techniques are present throughout my work, I’m often guided by an impulse to extend manual processes to even less efficient and more time-consuming ways of operating. In some ways this process is a lot like setting yourself up to ‘re-invent the wheel’ over and over again. By consuming time and attention differently, I’m interested in work where the invention or uncovering of form and pattern might be attributed to an unfamiliar, but not unrelated, fork in the road of craft traditions typically seen in a linear march through time. In this way, I’m motivated to join a conversation around representing our relationship to scale as humans, from lineages to individual personalities, universals to specifics, and from models of future civilizations to recordings of intimate traces of our past and present existence.