STATEMENT OF WORK

Some of my earliest memories are of the bedtime stories told to me by my parents. While mostly tinged with humor and a great sense of pride, the underlying messages were clear. They would recount fighting in the streets of Bucharest as their two small children were home with their grandmothers. Homemade molotov cocktails, tanks rolling through the streets, and giant pots of ciorbă cooked at home only to find no one left on the Square to serve. 

I lay listening to these stories in complete awe and sometimes disbelief, comfortably in my brand new water bed in Miami, FL, where we were fortunate to emigrate to. 

These subconscious tensions are what drive my explorations and work. As someone born between two worlds, I have always been drawn to examine contradictory situations. Nostalgia and newness, a push and pull between synthetic and organic, ruins and the pristine, the boundaries between meticulous methods and un-calculated spontaneity. I represent these everyday contradictions within a very process-driven practice of layering, manipulating material, and playing with the ways in which these seemingly disparate surfaces and forms interact. 

My work often began as an exercise in building multiples. Inspired by Baroque period architecture encrusted with moldings and fine metal leaf, I seek to reinterpret these repetitive shapes and patterns as lustrous relics which would have been excavated from Atlantis, an imagined time and place. 

My ceramic objects are constantly subjected to various surface treatments and firings. As I work, I allow my pieces to morph into their final self, encasing each layer with my memories and locking them inside as a diary with a padlock and key. In this way, each piece develops its own personality as it evolves with me over time, imprinted with my innermost psyche, vested with meaning, and transforming into time capsules of my memories.