ARTIST STATEMENT_001.exe
Apathetic expressions, awkward hand holding, cell phones, the climax of apocalyptic disaster - all of these motifs coalesce into my stories, creating a transmundane world of electronic hopeless romanticism. At the cross section of speculative fiction and ecology, I examine relationships between humans, environments and technology through scrappy, uncomfortable fairy tales in clay, lithography, poetry and digital installation. With coils of clay, I sculpt inanimate ceramic objects and transform them into creatures. How can fired clay be given life, be made to look alive? Lump, lump, lump the piles of coil add up, are attached, scraped clean and fixed together to build the bodies of my creatures - amalgamations of abstracted geometric shapes with orifices, big cartoon faces, tiny hands. Their bodies are decorated with bright colors, textures, patterns and an absurd amount of detail to create an identity, a character, unique to each creature. Sometimes strange, non-clay materials provide clothes or enhancement; glittery goo, polyurethane, fake placenta. The outcomes resemble vinyl Japanese toys. In digital installations, I explore the personalities of these beings and how their hypothetical lives relate to our own, are dissimilar. Interactions between our world and the fantastical realms of my creations weave threads between past and present, dreams and reality. How can the imagined provide insight and inspiration with regards to our own contemporary issues? How do created fantasies inform spaces of reality?