EVOLUTIONAL ARCS

IMAGINING THE CHIMERIC ECOLOGIES OF CRAFT AND MADE MATERIALS IN A POST-ANTHROPOCENTRIC TOMORROW

THE HOUSEGUEST, 2022

found elm wood, aluminum, common Utah yellowjacket wasp, sand-resin, latex rubber

An amalgamation, The Houseguest is a thing of uncertainty; an entity of mystery, always sitting just on the edge of your peripheral vision...

The Houseguest explores the allure of the estranged familiar; the sensation experienced when reconnecting with something or someone long dormant, buried, afar; the feeling of walking through one’s childhood home, now filled with unknown belongings and a stranger's memories; the reemerging landscape surrounding Utah’s Lake Powell and its need for wholly new land management and ecological study parameters, terms, and methods - its face unrecognizable as its once-watery object graveyard petrifies in the desert sun, a silt-strew conglomerate of empty beer cans and wedding rings; the shapes and emotions of remembered maps and landscapes, each inextricably tied to the former self who once experienced them. 

SHE'S BEEN PRACTICING HER NEEDLEWORK, 2022

pine straw (needles), found Walmart shopping bag (40.7704948, -111.8764907)

So, she sits, silently in her rage. Slowly, methodically, meticulously, deliberately puncturing the impossibly thin membrane of an abandoned sack with the delicately sharp tines of pine straw. One by one, she fills in the blank canvas of its skin with hundreds of tiny holes, each bearing the form of their violence within them. She silently pursues this pointedly pointless act, repeating again and again the same action of penetrating, perforating, concealing. An exercise of muted rage. Focused wholly on holes, she absorbs herself in a task as useless as she has been made to feel. A meditative practice of diverted, masked fury; She’s Been Practicing her Needlework.


LACEMAKER'S BREAD, 2022
bronze cast crocheted lace bread-bags

Part of an ongoing and evolving body of work, Lacemaker’s Bread is cast bronze made using a two-part sand-resin mold of a piece of crocheted lace made from repurposed bread-bags. 

Though only recently formed, this coral-like bronze fragment already carries with it a complex past; the implications and associations of its heritage visible in the crisp-edged wrinkles and smooth faced surfaces of its plastic ancestors imprinted upon the contours of its body. Neither plastic nor lace, it is possible that its bronzed flesh carries within it traces of the bread which the plastic husks of its forefathers once protectively sheathed. 

A NICE PLACE TO REST ONE'S HEAD, 2022
salvaged steel rods, pipe, copper wire; handmade fasteners; hardware (74”H x 48” x 36”)

A Nice Place to Rest One’s Head is an ode to all of the resourceful and clever birds who build their nests out of bits of plastic, hair, t-shirt, and yarn; to the clutch of starlings and their tenacious mother who nested deep in my dryer duct last spring, rendering it seasonally useless; the chain-link fence that has been partially consumed over the years by the tree by which it was erected, the two now inseparable without mutual destruction; to the urban squirrels who have perfected the art of social, solicitous foraging outside my apartment building windows, and to the cities of subway-riding rats and their underground empire.