I am a multimedia artist working out of San Francisco, CA. I like working with “supportive materials”—materials that don’t usually get to be the “main characters” in art, but which facilitate the making and presenting of art pieces. I want to make the functional, behind-the-scenes objects emotional, dynamic, and useless. When I include “main characters” in my work like watercolor paintings or photographs, I demote them to objects—raw materials that bend, rip, and hide in service of the completed sculpture.
Misusing materials makes for a more interesting story. When I am working on a new piece, I think about the relationships between the objects I am using. If I attach them “wrong”, or at least not in the way they were intended, I have to think more about each action. Is there really a right and wrong way for two objects to come together? Sometimes the physics of my work narrates my life. I like the ways that life is awkward. When people come together it is almost always clunky and uncertain until they learn to communicate comfortably. We come together with different histories and motivations and things like humor can’t always transgress these lines. My sculptures use a language of discomfort and misuse, defamiliarizing and thus objectifying each material element.
One huge influence on my work is the artist GEGO. She was an architect-turned-sculptor who created vast geometric spaces using very little material. Her sculptures were more than the sum of their humble wire parts. She was obsessed with lines, a seemingly finite concept which she transformed into infinity.
When people see my work, I hope that they will trace the relationships between materials and discover a “plot” of sorts. I hope it can be a sort of Rorschach, maybe making a viewer think about how the coming together of two tiny and unspecial tools (tool subjects, even) can relate to the compatibility of people or ideas in their day to day lives.