artist statement
november 2014
Live through the long years,
pine, and pray for me
in my next existence,
I who’ll have no one
to visit the places I once was
– Saigyo
We are passengers in this place. We do not linger. We do not know where we come from. We do not know what we are.
Impermanence, interconnection, and the passage of time are common themes. Many of my works incorporate containers (vessels that hold or fail to hold), horizons (lines depicting infinity and the duality between physicality and spirit), or grids (forms that both isolate and connect). Making is a process of thinking aloud, of casting out questions and listening for answers that may never be provided. Alchemy, nature, language, tradition, and ritual provide a framework for these conversations.
Also present in my work is the sense of memory and loss created by places once inhabited, but now abandoned – restless bodies bearing signs of passage, ghostly limbs left behind that somehow continue in their ceaseless transmission – an echo, a return, a lingering sense of place-ness.
Our existence here is but a small part of a greater whole that we cannot hope to fully comprehend and whose intricacies we frequently fail to see. What continues? What remains?