Artist Statement

 

My sculpture work consists of creating and documenting installations of exaggerated repetitions, often of plastic mass-produced items. Despite the artificial material, the resultant works allude to natural processes and forms, and to the simple beauty found in nature. Searching out and emphasizing simplicity and beauty in an increasingly discordant world is a method by which dominance over one’s surroundings can be established; by attempting to control a limited segment of the raucousness of contemporary society’s production, I can begin to escape from it.

Exploring inconsistencies and absurdities – such as the notion that an individual is capable of controlling or escaping fully their surroundings – is the crux of my work. Contradictions abound. For example, the processes by which the works are created often destroy the originally intended functionality of the individual object. This alters the direct commodity and consumerist reading; distinct lines of who is consumer and how the object or concept is ‘consumed’ are made ambiguous. Further underscoring the notion of contradictions in my work is that the combination of materials and construction methods I use can be interpreted as simultaneously ephemeral and everlasting, as they are often impermanent installations created from non-biodegradeable items. Additional explorations of the blurred boundaries between contradictory or permeable meanings, such as are found in the inter-material and -linguistic titles, are of considerable relevance to my work as well.