Graduate School: 2021-2024
Soil Samples & Landscapes
Growing up I was taught the importance of sharing meals around the table. These memories of sharing dinners have resulted in my fascination with functional objects, because of their ability to facilitate connections while providing nourishment. The work I am making explores the landscape around me. I am informed by my surroundings, both past and present. The objects of these places influence my work as I seek to understand how what we leave behind will impact our future landscape. I desire my work to provide nourishment through the ritual of daily use. Through my making I am looking to understand the place I am living and how I fit within it.
Junkyard Cairns
The backdrop of the Chicagoland suburban sprawl lighted my childhood. The days and nights were filled with brightly colored, mass produced toys and objects geared towards old-school, innocent childlike play. My work is exploring the consumption and materialism of the Anthropocene through the framework of the junkyard, the playground, and the wooden chest of my disremembered youth.
The foraged “junk” from our landscape becomes recontextualized within the objects. Foraging discarded remnants of materials from our landscape that arise from our capitalist consumer structures present in our society. Utilizing the foraged fragments within the sculptures, I seek to recontextualize and highlight the superfluous waste in our environment. The broken fragments of plastic, ceramic tile, metal, and other materials serve as visual metaphors for the transient nature of our consumption and the structures we currently live in.
The compositions I create are lighthearted, bouncy, and a bit mischievous. They examine our consumer society, and the spaces of learned collecting and consuming. Through my work, I aim to provoke reflection on the consequences of our excessive consumption and question the idea of our disposable culture. By breathing new life into these fragments incorporated with the work, I am to give animacy to the forgotten artificial fragments littering the landscape leading to a shift towards a more sustainable and mindful approach to consumption. Through my making I am processing and cataloging moments from the world around me.
Micro Landscapes & Souvenirs
Do the pace of our lives and habits of disposability make our junk invisible? Sparks fly when I encounter a vibrant fragment from human waste rendered invisible, we all exist within. With a curious mind, I am drawn to the pops of colors, values and forms scattered about our streets and fields. These curiously shards amass in the library of fragments in my studio. Through my crafted repository of found and made objects, I have created a multitude of opportunities to play, seeking to explore the wonder I first felt when foraging. Working in the framework of play my practice uses ceramics and altered plastic objects to recontextualize the foraged junk within sculptural objects, centering the junk ubiquitous on our landscapes. Play is a tool and a practice I engage to challenge the structures we exist within, creating wonder, curiosity and a desire to pause and play. My assembling process is slow, in opposition to the pace at which we consume. The viewer is invited to follow that pace of my practice; to view the works, one must pause and investigate to observe the connects, nuance, and materials assembled into one object. These slow observations in my practice, from gathering to making, enhances and reinforces the curiosity in the environments I inhabit, as I process the decay, beauty, and lingering plastic. Responding to the vignettes I see within my immediate environment; I create micro landscapes through a playful lens that translate the world through my perspective, translating the beautiful haunting altered landscape we inhabit into perceptible scale.
