“living is grazing,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            memory is chewing cud”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       - Agnes Martin, The Untroubled Mind.

I was raised by a single mother in the army. Childhood was a succession of army bases and new schools. I lacked the locational and generational belonging I perceived as the American norm through TV shows like “Alf” and “Family Ties”. In search of this norm, I became a collector of old photos, discarded books, folktales, broken toys, scratched records, Greek myths and anything that could provide me with a larger, human narrative in which I could situate my own story. These second-hand memories became my surrogate home.

This desire for home greatly informs my practice. My installations and sculptures portray the personal narratives of people excluded from officially recorded histories. I collaborate with individuals and families, exchanging stories and building friendships that ultimately yield relationally dynamic pieces. My work pays homage to my collaborators, retells their stories, and invites viewers to recognize what is familiar, and in turn, recognize themselves in the Othered.

Site specificity is essential to my practice. My sites emphasize race and gender dichotomies within America’s cultural tableau. For example, I often install works in formerly industrial spaces. These spaces are conventionally male and public – spaces that have excluded the proverbial “weaker sex”, relegated to the domestic sphere. By contrast, my projects assert a female-presence in this historically male-dominant arena. I juxtapose sculpture and site to open a dialog surrounding history, location, domesticity, dominance, the public and private, and effectively, America’s ever changing identity. In this way I hope to incite social change to empower women and communities who have been systematically devalued throughout this nation’s history.

Process is equally significant. I often employ repetitious stitching and mark making that allow me to experience each second, minute, and hour as they pass. Many unassumingly small pieces take weeks and sometimes months to complete. Each work is a vestige of touch, time and craft, a quiet protest to American consumerism.

My projects are a materialization of time, a record of my process and life. Studio production is an external reflection of my want for home. The short moments I occupy earth are couched in a larger human context in which we all are conditioned by matters of gender, race, culture, and a longing for something that exceeds those limitations. The more I labor within the studio, the more I make a place for myself within this world, and reconcile life’s brevity with a sense of belonging.