Collage
I think in pieces. I am always putting things together and taking things apart in my thinking, so it makes sense that my work is also about assembling order from what I find. I want to make meaning from what is there and what is missing.
I like to gather discarded things and find ways to make them useful again. I like to repurpose images. I collect old art show post cards, full of their own history and context, and cut them out, reorient them. I like to use the negative space that I cut away, turn it into its own object.
I like to take something meant to be flat and push it into three dimensions. Post cards become reliefs. Figures cut from paper become sculptures. I cut out figures and back them with another image that grounds them. This makes a figure/ground conversation.
I like to think outside the frame. I affix my reliefs directly on the wall, sculptures on a pedestal, gently tethered so they don't blow away.
Installation
I. Trees
So vulnerable, easy to cut down. A loss of history, memory, shade, birds, air to breathe. It is not seen as tragic but a causal necessity. Every day we walk by trees hardly noticing. A new house? Knock down those trees in the way. 10 billion lost every year.* Rather than be helpless, I make work to bring attention to the thoughtless destruction and hope for planting trees, a place to pause, meditate, reconnect.
II. Paper
So vulnerable, easy to cut and punch holes through. Out in the open, not protected behind glass or in a frame. The work could be bent or crushed easily. As a viewer, we could feel towering and powerful or hesitant and careful, not wanting to do harm. Leaving something vulnerable is a way to catch attention, a way to connect, a way to care.
*According to a study in Nature in 2015.