ARTIST STATEMENT

      My work investigates grief, memorialization, and the fallible nature of bodies and memory and grows out of my experience with grief and dissociation as a result of the death of my mother from breast cancer in my early twenties. I am a conceptual artist whose material and media are informed by my subject matter. Using  a range of material I work within sculpture, installation, poetry, performance and photography to question: How do we memorialize? How is remembering in and out of our control? How do we make sense of bodies malfunctioning, becoming foreign or dissociated? How can performance force the mind to inhabit the body? 

    Recently, I’ve been exploring photography and sculptural work that utilizes light, clothing, organic materials, industrial tools, and household items to examine ‘remembering’ as a process of investigation. My work is in conversation with artists like Hannah Wilke, Bill Viola, Chiharu Shiota, Yayoi Kusama and others who grapple with death and use clothing and light as metaphor for memory or tools for new imagination.
     Light has become central to my work since I began taking photos of clothing layered with a mix of natural materials and found objects on top of a 3 x 6’ light box.The light table transforms clothing into shadow and light creating disembodied figures abstracted with the inclusion of sticks, nails and pulleys, or decaying fruit encased in discarded plastic bottles. This work is an investigation of remembering but also an investigation of the body and its ability to function, malfunction, or become foreign. By using clothing and found objects to create figurative forms absent of the actual human body I use what is left behind when someones dies to examine our inability to mold these remnants, physical and mental, into an actual recapturing/experiencing of the person/memory that has been lost.