ARTIST STATEMENT
I work across media, looking through the lens of one medium into another. I'm searching for what painting can tell me about photography, or drawing can teach me about sculpture, or how matter can lead me to poetry. Ultimately, I treat the act of translation, from one medium to another, as generative.
My mind thinks in images as my body works in materials. Process and material are the root of my conceptual concerns. I make visual and material poems that inhabit metaphor. Images turn over in my mind and materials in my hands until the familiar becomes mysterious. It's the plastic equivalent of repeating a word aloud until the syllables are stripped of meaning and the sounds become strange and new.
I use gestures that mediate, translate, transform: printing, rubbing, transferring, folding. To fold is to double. It multiplies. The Spanish word is doblar, which also means to dub. To fold is to translate. I make folded rubbings that mark and map themselves. Then I make rubbings of these folded rubbings: they duplicate and multiply. A rubbing, like a photograph, is an index: it points to what caused the image, like a fingerprint points to the finger.
Sometimes I transform light into color. I print cameraless photographs, cyanotypes that develop in sunlight. Sometimes I treat color as light. I transfer stained fiber from painted paper to masking tape, as if light were dust caught on flypaper. I weave color into the structure of folded paper, introducing a new hue with each fold. The build-up of color reads as the inverse (the negative) of cast shadows.
I approach my work with a collage sensibility. Collage is a strategy of infinite possibility. My work is cyclical, with new work made from old work (imagine a sourdough starter -- it keeps it alive). Each piece is linked -- physically, materially, formally -- to a larger family, as if sharing common DNA or an etymological root.
I work across media, looking through the lens of one medium into another. I'm searching for what painting can tell me about photography, or drawing can teach me about sculpture, or how matter can lead me to poetry. Ultimately, I treat the act of translation, from one medium to another, as generative.
My mind thinks in images as my body works in materials. Process and material are the root of my conceptual concerns. I make visual and material poems that inhabit metaphor. Images turn over in my mind and materials in my hands until the familiar becomes mysterious. It's the plastic equivalent of repeating a word aloud until the syllables are stripped of meaning and the sounds become strange and new.
I use gestures that mediate, translate, transform: printing, rubbing, transferring, folding. To fold is to double. It multiplies. The Spanish word is doblar, which also means to dub. To fold is to translate. I make folded rubbings that mark and map themselves. Then I make rubbings of these folded rubbings: they duplicate and multiply. A rubbing, like a photograph, is an index: it points to what caused the image, like a fingerprint points to the finger.
Sometimes I transform light into color. I print cameraless photographs, cyanotypes that develop in sunlight. Sometimes I treat color as light. I transfer stained fiber from painted paper to masking tape, as if light were dust caught on flypaper. I weave color into the structure of folded paper, introducing a new hue with each fold. The build-up of color reads as the inverse (the negative) of cast shadows.
I approach my work with a collage sensibility. Collage is a strategy of infinite possibility. My work is cyclical, with new work made from old work (imagine a sourdough starter -- it keeps it alive). Each piece is linked -- physically, materially, formally -- to a larger family, as if sharing common DNA or an etymological root.
