STATEMENT OF WORK

I work with familiar relics from everyday life such as curtains, salt shakers, chewed gum, a chair, a dress. I adjust these objects--cutting, sewing, adding material, dyeing. I arrange the altered forms in subtly skewed vignettes that reflect culturally embedded views of sexuality, identity, and class. Reading and research ground my work in history, while objects and images allude to memory and sensory experience.

Literature informs my practice, as reflected in pieces’ titles. The title taken from a piece of literature often connects and encapsulates the emotional tenor of the work in a parallel imaginary world. Recent work incorporates thrift shop figurines and dolls, among other things. As decorative objects, they evoke memories of home and domestic life, while also embodying gender and racial stereotypes. In a 2022 piece, I used those conflicting associations to create cognitive dissonance and unease. The title quotes from Invisible Man: “. . . walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones . . .” -Ralph Ellison. The work alludes to the pervasive whiteness of institutions of power, and to the destructive assumption of racial neutrality in US culture. In “walk softly,” figurines, embedded in a pool of plaster, look toward a postcard image of a waterfall. The landscape image can reference an idealized family vacation, or can evoke the colonizing vision of westward expansion that underlies US history. As they embark on their journey, the objects are consumed by a massive flood of whiteness, of which the figures are collectively unaware.