Artist Statement

Through my multimodal, creative research, I find and ask questions; at the center of my exploration is the question, what does it mean to be human?    My inquiry-based practice is prolific, and my work is often obsessive, rooted in material, procedural, and conceptual experimentation. My labor manifests in interdisciplinary work that includes drawing, installation, sculpture, assemblage, experimental sound and video, artist’s books, music composition, painting, print, photography, social practice, writing, performance, and their many intersections.  

I draw on a breadth of experience as a 25-year multidisciplinary artist, designer, and arts educator to utilize a wide toolbox of strategies, materials, and processes, finding strength in the disencumbered nature of a broad, dynamic practice.  Whether I look through the lenses of geomorphology, the poetics of space, ethnomusicology, linguistic prosody, or design principles in architecture, I pursue connections and disparities of pattern and other formal relationships in the visible and audible world. My work is rarely declarative; rather, it reflects the deep curiosity at the root of my practice, a relentless inquiry into the interconnected systems that inform our humanity. I do this work to better understand the world, to invite discourse, and to find answers that spawn new and better questions. As I push at the boundaries of my studio practice, I often return to the question, what can art do?

I regularly use rituals, rules, and other structural tools to establish a container for my work: a 1000-day walking ritual, one hundred days of a ritualized intervention in a public space, a set of studio alter egos with distinct rules of operation, a new artist’s book daily for fifty days, or the year-long daily rewriting of a one-sentence artist statement.  Providing a temporal structure to establish the conditions for experimentation–building the container before deciding how to fill it–has led to exciting collisions of discipline and compelling new ways of looking and listening.

The artist statement should not be static. For a year, I wrote a new, one-sentence artist statement at the beginning of each day. In the evening, as I processed the key moments of the day, I sometimes amended the statement to better encapsulate the actualities of the day.