Artist Statement
My research and scholarship of creative work focuses on material explorations broadly centered on clay and specifically around porcelain. My work is influenced by the complexity of memory and bodily experience through habitual, sensual, and erotic connectivity along with the capacity of empathy to carry through object, material and space. A sensitivity to clay and ceramic objects informs and intensifies the way I approach properties of other materials and objects. Body and object collide and expand in both lived and imagined space. My aim is to find moments of shift, slippage, and compression through physical and conceptual relationships. With common craft and construction processes and materials, I create forms that are as playful and curious, as they are subversive. Porcelain, plaster, plywood, plastics, insulation foam, and yarn often mingle in forms that move beyond the aggregate of materials. These new forms carried by their material histories are borne into the imaginative space of the viewer.
Clay is a material that stretches across time and culture often bridging the distance between the physical and spiritual through ritual and custom. Clay is also a literal and metaphoric record of time both geological and anthropomorphic. Imbued with rich and varied histories ceramic objects reside in the background of everyday life. Our relationships to clay and ceramic objects, though often overlooked, are deeply seeded in a history of movement and display through utility and ornament. Ceramics has the advantage of already being there; it just needs to be seen and enacted. It is this perpetuity of emergence and connection to the body and materiality from which my practice is centered, expands and returns.