Statement Project

2021 October

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

2021 May

The Anthropocene. I am a meanderer, my tie ropes slack; I am a worker, a social creature, a mammal, an inhabitant of Earth, the universe, a connector, a nurturer, a bright light, a community builder, an activist, a teacher, a human, happily stardust. And confounded.

Decentering is at the center of my thoughts now. I watch the birds outside my window, living their lives, or sitting outside, the ants’ efforts, and the trees and their time and miraculous growth,  and the busy animals in my neighborhood, or in their neighborhood,  pursuing their day, centered on their existence, and inside, my dog soundly and trustingly sleeping. And I am learning that I am not the center. I apologize for coming to this understanding so late in life. Yet,  I am torn, because as I struggle to decenter myself, I still feel an awe of human endeavor, and I want to pick up the pieces and make things whole again and find the order in the unruly mess that is our world.

So, inchingly, I put pieces back together into sculptures and installations. I make art of the pieces around me, reassembling objects, trying to put things right again. I assemble clay forms that I have made, that I have broken, and bits and pieces I have salvaged from the city dump, and cultural odds and ends-patterns and places, sometimes I add colors, obscuring the past, or project video stories, making the forms seemingly change shape and meaning. And, I like to invite people to my studio to make their own marks on my work, adding their life to my work, and erasing some of me. Maybe this is an attempt at decentering.

I am aware of the greatness of the universe and try try try to acknowledge the wholeness of every living thing.

“…for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” – Walt Whitman

2021 March

I am curious; investigating human behavior, the physical world, phenomena, the Earth and our lives here, engages me every day. The more I know, the more I am interested in. I study history because history allows me to learn from multiple life experiences and find the borders and boundaries that define and unite us.

I regularly make large scale sculpture and installation that originate from my research into the migratory routes of people and the convergent evolution of cultural motifs. My work starts with clay, a material that suits me because of its connection with the earth, and because of its history as a creative material, allowing me to look at cultural development through its use. I reference migration routes, human origins, cultural myths and relationships, physics, ceramic technologies through time, the origins of clay as a material, geology, politics, food.  I frequently involve the community in my projects as a means of manifesting the human connections that my work, and I, need. As we work and I listen to the voices of the community, I learn how many ways being human is defined and the value of our relationships with each other. I mourn the  predictable cycles of culture: ambition, conquest, hubris, collapse, but I find solace in recalling this continuity and the inherent optimism of humans. Humans make grand things, and we have been making things since we have been human. As history is cyclical and instructive, history is also full of supposition and misrepresentation, and subjective interpretation. Dissecting my own biases and assumed knowledge is integral in my process. Thus, my work presents moments of ambition and collapse through exploring physical balance and precarity, transition and perception. Making work that fosters connections to a broader community and creates space for self-examination is my goal.

2021 January

I am curious. I am an artist. My work is generated by my interest in cooperation, cultural research, and infatuation with material and process.

My large-scale sculptures and installations are a laboratory for exploring cooperation and collaboration. I start with an idea, then I involve the community in the planning and execution of my projects as a means of making real the human connections that the work requires and I need. As we work towards a shared goal, we are a community, representing human productivity, ingenuity, and resilience. My work is a conceived collection of parts, an assemblage of moments, the effort of a collective. The surfaces of my pieces refer to pattern, erosion, and the passage of time. In the end, the work represents moments of ambition, collapse, transition. I make art to as an investigation, to learn, and to make a community.

I am an artist, historian, and explorer; my work is generated by investigations of material and process, structured by research. The geologic and cultural history of clay are equal taproots. Its historical, and continuous, use as a functional and creative material allows me to consider the phases of cultural development and the universal human experience….from the making of domestic objects to architectural structures. Clay, the transformative, protean material, allows for my daily experimentations, development, and discovery. An artist’s studio practice recapitulates the outside world.

To best fulfill my effort to represent the human experience, I make large scale sculptures and installations that distill my fascination in the convergent evolution of culture. I frequently involve the community in the planning and execution of my projects as a means of making real the human connections that my work, and I, need. As community participants and I work towards a shared goal, I am part of a living community, a microcosm, representing human productivity, ingenuity, and resilience. My work is a collection of parts, an assemblage of moments, the effort of a collective. The surfaces of my pieces refer to historic pattern, erosion, and the passage of time through layering and fissuring. In the end, the work includes moments of ambition and collapse, precarity, transition, and perception. I make art to create space for investigation, to foster connections to a broader community, and to learn from history and forge a connection with our evolution.

September 2020

I am a student of human history and human universals. I study geographic, human, and emotional borders and boundaries. I make work that remembers ambition and collapse. My studio practice derives from traditional craft motifs, architecture, geological processes, and urban development–signs of human connections, progress, and the long arc of time. I frequently involve the community in my larger projects as a means to manifest the human connections and communications that my work, and I, need. As we work and I listen to the voices of the community, I question what it means to be human, our relationships with each other and the predictable cycle of repression, idealism, and revolution. I find solace in this continuity. Lately, I have been exploring color, and the myth of whiteness in classical art. Dissecting my own biases and assumptions is inherent to my process. I try, every day, to make art that connects to a broader community, creates space for self-examination, and opens doors to discourse.

May 2014

The understanding that we humans share common experiences, impulses, and desires is the bass line that thrums in my brain as I work.  As humans, we have shared the same hazards, hopes and biology, and as cultures, we build and create and harness and attempt to order our natural world.  Cultures and peoples are born and are forgotten; music and dance and art are temporal, part of what is lost and forgotten.  The poignancy of this loss haunts me.  Who knows the full history of an ancient object?  It has been seen in varied manifestations through time; once perhaps useful, then a discard, then a discovery by an archaeologist, an object of study, then swooned over in a museum, then maybe again, found lying on its side in a storage room,  or on the floor of a gallery, being grouped with other objects by a curator who is piecing together another, more complicated story.  I want my work to have that same flexibility and to ask the viewer to participate in making the work live in different contexts and orientations.  To this end, I have come to recognize that context and mutability have a major influence on how I perceive art, both my own and others’. As I work, I imagine how the work might change through time or in different locations and have begun to see situating the work as an pertinent aspect of my process.  In order to satisfy my goals and develop my work,  installing work in temporary settings, site specific work,  and public work has become imperative.

My work draws from and responds to motifs, patterns, and structures found through history and pre-history that rebound into contemporary art and life. Our vitality and our mortality  are part of the equation.  Like all of us, I have absorbed the marks that people around the globe use to decorate their pots, furniture, linens, buildings, and themselves; they are filtered through me and end up on my work.  I work primarily with clay and wood because the nature of the materials exhibit time,  process and change, much like our bodies, our species, our culture.  The materials  tells the story of climate, geologic origins, environmental conditions, technological developments and every moment of the artist’s process.

Fall 1997

All of my work is hand-built from white stoneware.  I slowly build each piece by pinching and paddling coils and slabs of clay.  When the form is complete, I paint it with a clay slip.  After the piece is leather-hard, I rub it smooth, then begin the process of incising the lines and carving the surface.  After drying, the piece is bisque-fired to cone four.  To complete the piece, I wash it with an oxide stain, glaze and re-fire it.  The finished pots have all the marks and irregularities of a hand-made piece, a quality that I hope you value as much as I do.

I have been working in clay nearly my entire life, but not until I started studying ceramics at art school in Norway did I begin to find an identity as a clay artist.  After returning to the United States, I went to study at the University of Minnesota with the renowned potter Warren Mackenzie.  From Warren I learned a respect  for the properties of clay, a pride in craftsmanship, and an understanding of the importance of form.  After finishing my B.A., I had the opportunity to do archeological work in the Near East, which allowed me to pursue a long abiding interest in pre-history.  With each artifact excavated at  the site, I began to more fully understand the beauty that exists in edges rubbed soft by human touch and to appreciate the aesthetics of cracked worn surfaces created by the power of time and geology.  My experiences there changed my set of visual values, so when I decided to complete my  M. F. A., I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to be a student of Viola Frey at the California College of Arts and Crafts.  With Viola I began to explore the figure.  Since then I have continued to pursue both functional and sculptural ceramics.  I find each mode benefits from the transfer of visual information and experience from one to the other.

Since that time, I have had the good fortune to continue to work on other excavations, especially an early-human site in Africa.  For me, the making of pots, which has such a long history, is a deeply satisfying expression of my connectedness with others and our common humanity. There is such beauty in the scarred and worn surface of our planet, and in a person’s gnarled hands and feet, and in a pot well made and well used.