Artist Statement
11/ 2023


I once stepped on a tiny glow-in-the-dark star on my walk home from work. It stuck to the bottom of my shoe, until I noticed the unbalance in my step, which I corrected by pocketing it. In the darkness of my pocket it must have lit the collection of lint spectacularly. The conditions for wonder are subjective and varied, yet rely on the influence of the uncontrollable and our ability to find meaning within it. The star stuck to my shoe was a quiet demonstration of these conditions at work. The plastic, chalk full of phosphorescent powder, was charged with inescapable ties to the stars that once decorated my childhood bedroom. The silly, sentimental, superstitious portion of my brain carried it home and went so far as to borrow a ladder from my neighbor to superglue it above my bed.

I am interested in sculpture for its ability to harness a viewer’s personal associations with ephemera as a means to embrace the subjective nature of how artworks are received. My recent work is constructed from materials I associate with places of personal significance and familial history, and are fed by the desire to bring physicality to a record that otherwise exists solely in memory, photography, or writing. My figures are often blurred at the edges, on the verge of dispersal, if not already blended with the landscape. I choose the mediums I work in with a similar concern for legibility— cement, steel, plaster, paint, sand, light— all exist in stages of transformation.

My work obscures the distinguishing characteristics of human, object, and landscape. Before the plastic star stuck to my shoe, it illuminated a crack in the sidewalk. Before that it provided a break in some other ceiling. I make work that is as connected to human experience as it is the landscape it is ingrained in, like light cast from a piece of plastic onto the world it traverses.