Based in cross-disciplinary practice, my work is concerned with the materiality of the world, how materials are located in time, and how both their substance and their meaning changes within time. In this way, my studio-based experiments hybridize historical and contemporary aesthetic culture, detailing the migrations of form and meaning over time. Architecture in varying stages of decline has been the most consistent presence in my work. This stems from a fascination with material's inevitable movement towards its own end through indifference and neglect. Fusing together opposing forces conceptually and physically is an underlying element of this work. With this, the boundaries between presentation and process are often blurred as at no time do I consider the experiment or work ever complete; the objects may temporarily be at rest, but their work is not finished.
Rooting this work in a troubled process of becoming, I often arrange for potentially futile propositions or modes of working that I must struggle against to overcome. With this approach, the material process of simply making something can influence thinking and decision-making in unexpected ways. Through collecting cast off items from various sources and then breaking apart and repurposing past art works and the run off of their creation (including all the dust and debris swept up in the studio) there becomes an accretion process to the point where contemporary, synthetic material becomes mind. Striving to transcend the limits of the insensate to become more like thoughtful, natural formations is what I envision for this material. Decision-making processes are chronicled within time in the form of new layers and additions with older forms still visible underneath. The continuous build up of the past, endlessly transfigured to the point of collapse, places the present on an increasingly more tentative footing. Each new work recalls a not so distant former material existence, as if the material were eternally saying, “I am still here.”
Baroque/allegorical motifs surrounding the transient nature of the material world and the tendency of all things towards entropy are significant to this project. The self-abnegating destruction of human impulse is a condition from which only nature itself may be exempt. Nature continues to exist beyond human control, despite our notions to the contrary. The political, social and aesthetic meanings of baroque allegory seem more relevant in our own epoch of late capitalism than ever before. One mode through which we are now faced with unprecedented destruction is the production of an astonishing surplus of cheaply produced items of so-called use. These harbingers of decaying meaning and the denuded self are themselves semi-corpse forms already, though hastily on their way to the grave at once. It appears that nature, in the form of an uprising ruin is the only force that can change this course through its own destructive power. My work often suggests an image of what that ever-present force might look like as applied to our quotidian, contemporary material world.