Statement

What is Nature worth? What does It do for us? What is It’s inherent value?

Is it possible to balance the manufactured with the organic, the man-made with the earth-grown? In decades to come, how will Nature respond to the synthetic materials that humans generate?

Plastic pervades our lives and serves important roles in everything from the medical industry to agriculture and transportation. It makes things easier in many ways, while simultaneously wreaking havoc on the planet and its non-human inhabitants. This work investigates relationships between interior (psychological) and exterior (physical) landscapes. My long-term relationship working with plastic is an ongoing attempt to understand the complexities of this petroleum-based substance and the effects it has on our world.

For over 15 years, my studio practice has been motivated by interests in relationships between humans and the natural environment, and has been expressed primarily through the use of post-consumer materials assembled into abstract fields of pattern and color.

My work is driven by a curiosity about material culture, and an interest in systems of growth and decay that exist within nature. I think of my studio practice as a cultivation of the materials remaining from my own consumption, or from a variety of jobs, such as hand-woven carpet repair, or automotive upholstery restoration. I use processes inherent within the textile field: piecing, cutting, splicing, layering- utilizing the pre-existing palette of the materials themselves. The actions of tying, binding, and wrapping are metaphors for stabilizing my personal dis-ease, and longing to reach the intangible sense of peace experienced within healthy ecosystems.

My intention is to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. The familiar, yet ephemeral qualities of the materials I use comment on the fragility and malleability of human lives and their environment. I am interested in creating works that seduce viewers through materiality and invite them to contemplate their ideas about consumption and disposal; nature and culture; attraction and repulsion.