Artist Statement

My Artist Statement: My work begins and ends in the human body.

My art begins and ends in the human body. Our remnants (what we cast off and leave behind in the form of waste, trash, memory etc.) ground and connect us to the earth. “Where do the things in our lives come from and where they go once we’ve used them?” By representing and re-animating remains, I explore the potential of materials to ask questions and to evoke larger environmental relationships.

I treat the products of our culture as physical remains of our bodies and explore how we generate objects as concrete extensions of ourselves. With man-made forms, materials, and processes, I extend, inhibit, and modify elements of the human body. I reuse, up-cycle, and revalue regular, standardized, and mass-produced materials into something one-of-a-kind and special to invert the associations we make with different kinds of detritus. My raw materials are manufactured products with a particular use history and product life cycle. Whether I distort industrially produced goods in the white cube or manufacture surreal interventions in public spaces, my work explores the limits of functionality and worth.

I give a human dimension to physical sites by highlighting their historical/narrative aspects and input human features into sterile goods by cutting, breaking, gluing, and carving them into forms that evoke the human body. These artworks are at once physical things and conceptual spaces. Through the labor and limitations of my own body, I questions which bodies are present and missing in political and cultural discourses. I explore the anatomical potential of the female body as a material metaphor for our actions to ask viewers whether our current situation is fixed or not and how change can emerge.