I grew up watching my working-class parents and grandparents carve, draw, sew, decorate and garden. My college education made me proficient in sculpting, sketching, painting, and printing. These formal and informal educations resulted in a compulsion to to combine fine art techniques with the functionality and utility of folk arts and crafts. By presenting skewed versions of everyday environments or objects, I want to present the viewer with an unusual perspective on reality.
I'm interested in the compulsion of humans across cultures to decorate and embellish themselves and their environments. I find the the primal side of human nature equally intriguing; possessing a morbid curiosity in human sacrifice, cannibalism, and violent initiation rituals. My work investigates these disparate realms and tries to understand how a species can be capable of such beautiful decoration and grisly deconstruction of the human body.
By placing them in constructed environments, the images and objects I create come closer to inhabiting an imagined world. My installations suspend reality and allow the viewer to consider strange possibilities in familiar settings. Everyday objects and materials draw the viewer in, but a closer inspection reveals that something is askew. The strangest, most disturbing moments of human experience permeate daily life more often than we think.
I'm interested in the compulsion of humans across cultures to decorate and embellish themselves and their environments. I find the the primal side of human nature equally intriguing; possessing a morbid curiosity in human sacrifice, cannibalism, and violent initiation rituals. My work investigates these disparate realms and tries to understand how a species can be capable of such beautiful decoration and grisly deconstruction of the human body.
By placing them in constructed environments, the images and objects I create come closer to inhabiting an imagined world. My installations suspend reality and allow the viewer to consider strange possibilities in familiar settings. Everyday objects and materials draw the viewer in, but a closer inspection reveals that something is askew. The strangest, most disturbing moments of human experience permeate daily life more often than we think.
