Biography

Gravity Series:

While gravity is popularly thought of as a force that pulls objects down, scientifically it is an understood as masses attracting one another. The work dramatizes resisting the seeming inevitability of being pulled in specific directions by external forces.  My inspiration from the contemplation of gravity is social and aesthetic. The Gravity series revolves conceptually around perseverance.     

Finally, my work is in celebration with the many persons who have, against all odds, persevered and remain resilient. Their weathering, due to the social forces they have resisted, is evident in the heaviness, knots, scars and bindings that remain perceptible and visible inside and out. 

Pinching :

"Nature makes no aesthetic mistakes," is a guiding principle of my pinch-formed vessels. For the viewer, the work “looks like leaves,” “tentacles,” “a cobra’s head,” and other organic protuberances or organic patterns. Indeed, I have adopted those labels for my repertoire of pinching techniques. In my process and thinking the work has long been about growth as it is a process that keeps me present.  I attend to details in the development of high relief surfaces, how the pieces engage with space (think of a fallen conifer cone) and much attention is given to transitions in the texture. I continually reach toward a flow in my practice and of the surface, texture and form inspired by nature. Most pieces are pinch-formed from one ball of clay without addition or subtraction of material. Currently I'm cultivating a black clay aesthetic.

Philosophizing Concretely:

I find myself moving away from the process of beginning with a conceptual motivation for my work. In the past I have usually started with a philosophical or sociological premise, but I found in the end, as one of my professors used to say, “great idea, but now you have to make art out of that idea.” So, my most recent body of work is kind of a release to work very formally with only aesthetics and principles as a primary driver of the process of making objects. Art is about ideas. I have an idea about space.

I work with space, and I am especially interested in the presence of space. I am very much intrigued by vessel space that is purposely thwarted. I get excited about this kind of refuted space, that is, utilitarian space that is argued against by an aesthetic decision. Often, my work blurs the inside/outside dichotomy making it a continuum. Outside is almost overwhelmed by the energy of the presence of the inside space. The avant-garde dancer, Martha Graham quipped, “I’m not out there alone, it’s me and all that wonderful space.”

My work also intentionally conflates the dichotomy of back and front. I make the facets compelling, irresistible, not able to be ignored. And I am intrigued by contrasting materiality or forms.  I take the idea of in the round as a problem to be explored.

Knot Stories:

“Knot Stories" are a critique of language. It is concerned with figuration and with the very structures of language that allow that figuration to take place. It employs the formal qualities of the preceding series, Cell Personae, for they share passionate critique, but this series is moving in an alternative direction. As is usual in my work I’m looking to our use of language which is rooted in Protestant Reformation, the Antebellum period thinking about material shapes and living images and the rhetoric of prejudice against ideas as shapes. Some questions that compel me are, what does it mean to redact a text? And what changes about an idea when it is spoken versus when it is written?  And what does it mean to materialize an idea, as in the words of Cornell West, “justice is what love looks like in the public sphere.” 

This series gives me scope to work more with the formal qualities of this “re-scripting the basic vocabulary of ceramics (slab construction and coils)”. Knot Stories are hanging wall sculptures and I find it thrilling that they are in conversation with painting, fiber works and text. These pieces recuperated a former philosophical aesthetic balance in my work. I have liberty to share ideas as expressions and even catharsis, to philosophize concretely, but also to make something beautiful along the lines of the broad attraction found in nature.

Cell Personae:

This installation comprises 25 cells that dramatize various facets of the prison industrial system, such as profiling, recidivism, and probation. Though clearly pertinent, and I’m not satiated with the latter subject as inspiration, this renewed series has given me scope to work more with the formal qualities of this “re-scripting the basic vocabulary of ceramics, slab construction and coils” (Adamson). Knot Stories are hanging wall sculptures and I find it thrilling that they are in conversation with painting, fiber works and text. My practices are back to a former balance and that I have more opportunities to share my ideas, as expressions and even catharsis, in slab form, the “principal” way I have expressed myself in clay over the years.