ARTIST STATEMENT

I have always had a real fascination with Asian aesthetics. When I was a child, my mother would take me to Philadelphia to visit my grandparents and we would often go the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I wanted to see the Chinese and Japanese rooms and the Duchamp collection over and over again. To me the objects, the materiality in these rooms, posed so many interesting questions. I was curious about how commonplace handmade things, particularly three-dimensional objects, were intriguing in their making, both beautiful or practical, and had a cultural sensibility so different from mine and yet somehow familiar. I still recall those rooms, vividly engrained in my memory. They are an evocative kind of cross-pollination experience that I keep carrying into my work.

My work as a painter, printmaker and installation artist weave together the personal and the communal, layering elements of visual information onto, and into substrates of hand formed paper as a material that is capable of advancing hybrid statements. I attempt to explore a fundamental quality and lineage of materiality that guides us in our 21st century lives, and binds us in a larger evolutionary process. By linking Asian traditions that I have studied, with Western ones, my printed and 3-dimensional constructions use embedded words, perforations, and photographic appropriations in a personal language of markings.  Symbols of decay and regeneration, or shapes for introspection are prominent. I rely on sources near and far for geographical immersions, drawing on sound, environmental recall, and diminishing aspects in nature that are often determined by our damaging behavioral agency. Walking and listening to the voices of nature often leads me into my work.

By using universal symbolic shapes and materials themselves as an essence, my intention is to capture fleeting moments, or eternal moments of recollection, and plant them onto surfaces that are formed by the kinesthesia of my own corporeal abilities. I use the tools and processes that I have come to understand best. Ritual is a grounding aspect of my process, and basically I consider myself a laborer of art, aligned with all those who acknowledge the many steps required for manual construction, and grounded by the labor of the hand for the making of objects.