Artist Statement

 

Relational interaction between individuals has become increasingly complex due to the ease of modern mobility and technology. Paradoxically, authentic interpersonal distance has widened as people have become superficially interconnected. Through my art practice, I seek a contemplative space, offering refuge from the cluttered landscape of our contemporary moment.  

 

In my view, the essential role of the artist is to be open to a concentrated reality, beyond the constructed artifice of authority, situated within the ineffable current of truth. In other words, the intangible and redemptive “essence of poetry;” which the poet Wallace Stevens said we turn to when our beliefs turn out to be false. Although memory, political violence, and individual dislocation tend to form a subtext in my work, I hope to encourage the viewer to reject fatalism and indifference.

 

Through the alchemy of materials and movement, I explore moments when thought dissipates, blurring the boundaries of specific narrative content. For me, art is also about the experience and process of creating hand-made objects; a participation in the long continuum of human mark-making. The marks stand on their own, transcendent of the political and cultural context of their creation, reminding us poetically of our shared unity.