ARTIST STATEMENT
As I child, I would say, “I want to unzip my body and fly free.”
Without despair, I wanted to experience the lightness of flight, like a bird. I make art because it allows me this sense of freedom.
I work on a monumental scale because of how it feels to be in space with something larger than myself. This, too, allows me to transcend my physical body’s spatial limits.
Making art offers me a direct connection to my earliest memories and the environment I grew up in. Feelings of comfort and discomfort, attraction and repulsion; feeling annoyed that I can only go as far as this body will take me, intuiting a greater freedom.
Memory is the tool with which I carve space.
In my work, I explore complex relationships between “self” — the raw, refined, physical body — and “other” — everything else.
I experiment with dynamics of power through the lens of violence and intimacy, both consensual and non-consensual.
In exploring the constantly turning thread of tension, anxiety, attraction and repulsion within dynamics of power, I’ve come to understand that the way they express themselves in the body, as waves of involuntary contraction, are fundamental expressions of our existence. It is in this continuously pulsating duality that much of my work is born.
What comes of it are pieces of variable scale, deteriorating and industrial, ephemeral and static. I use industrial, durable materials such as metals, stone, wood, and glass in combination with bio-materials such as flesh, organs, plant matter, and my own body. Through these materials, I work with the abstracted and eroticized body using its organic forms as a contextual starting point.
