Artist Statement
The last few years have not been a generative time for me. I have been thinking of the present as a fallow period to explain the non-work as important, and to give myself slack for being human. This is partly true. It is also true that I’ve shied away from my own art making out of fear and ambivalence, using my creative energy elsewhere and turning to readily available excuses as a way of avoiding self-imposed pressure to make something good. With these thoughts in mind, I turn to what I wrote in 2019 (below) and see I am still struggling with the first part while striving for the second. Until I more fully return to my practice and write something slightly more accurate, I will let what I wrote stand as it continues to be the closest guiding force to who I am as an artist.
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In recent months I have been attempting to strip down my own conceptions of my work and practice. I am trying to avoid posturing and reject the preconceived notions I have about what I am supposed to be doing and what I think others expect from me.
In light of this effort, my current practice has returned to building on previous projects that explore the relationship of simplicity and complexity and my interest in the discovery of pattern development. A constant in my practice is the enjoyment I have for losing myself in the demands of precision driven, labor, and time intensive processes that seek a perfection of skill and craft. With those motivations I try to allow for variation through mistakes that occur during hand based processes, the material influences of using wood, and the space in which my work is eventually presented. I consider these deviations and influences to the patterns I develop as parallels to naturally occurring patterns. Biology, chemistry, and physics all work to explain the natural world around us and the patterns that exist therein. And with each of these sciences there are countless variants that lead to differing outcomes of patterns as they play out in real time. Take our own DNA. It is a code that dictates everything from biological processes we need for life, to the genes that create expressions of our observable traits. But while our DNA is a set code that in a vacuum would lead to one exact outcome, outside environmental factors can affect how that code is read and eventually expressed. Or stated more succinctly, it is the idea of nature vs nurture as it plays out in life. This is all to say that I want my studio to have environmental influences even as I strive for control. I’m trying to strike a balance in my practice that reflects the world around me. With this goal I want my studio practice to bleed into how I live outside of making, seeking to balance what I can control and what I can’t while staying attuned to the natural world.