I make sculpture, installation, video, and socially interactive works originating from my interest in history, cultural patterns, and the non-existent boundary between nature and humans. I learn from the past and am reassured to see how often we have stumbled and still managed to thrive. However, history is also full of subjective interpretation. I am interested in our historical place on the land, and nature’s willingness to accommodate us, then reassert herself– violently, or so gradually that she replaces out efforts with hers, again.

In my studio I experiment. I test materials and ideas, seeking discovery.

My work uses an ecological approach including materials, processes, experiences, and research. It foregrounds how humans and the land co-exist, past, present, and future, as we are actively shaped by our interrelations. My installation and land pieces are a combination of made objects, usually clay, found objects, and sometimes projected imagery. 

This is what consumes me: our place in nature and making things whole. Consider the phrase, “in the middle of nowhere”. The idea that we humans describe being amid the complexity of nature “nowhere” demonstrates our species’ separation from the natural world and denial of our own reality as natural beings. I watch birds pursuing their lives, the organized, efficient ant communities, the industry of the bees, the secret brilliance of fungi, and the trees’ patient, miraculous growth and chemical conversations and know that no matter where I am, I am in the middle of everything, a part of the vast universe of which we are members.

So, tentatively, I work to piece together fragments into sculptures, reassemble objects, creating associations between natural objects and made objects. I look for places in nature where a blurry boundary exists between mediated and unmediated spaces, allowing me to understand the history of human intervention. I invite people to participate in the process, connecting my pieces to a larger story. I add symbols of culture—patterns, maps, and alphabets, to my broken chunks of clay and salvaged bits, and watch as these are worn away by natural processes. Sometimes I add colors, nature’s mantle, obscuring and/or beautifying the past, glossing over the wounds or embracing the disturbance; it’s human nature. My goal is to make things whole again…to un-mediate the mediated spaces, revivify objects that represent the worn and discarded, reanimate an ancient sense of freedom and awe in the presence of nature.

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you

– Walt Whitman

Deep down, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical. 

-Carl Sagan

If you go off into a far, far, forest and get very quiet, you’ll come to understand that you’re connected to everything 

– Alan Watts