words
I want to make nests of paintings and drawings -- pieces that become places made up of collected fragments or vast accumulations, so that you can crawl into them and live there. I think often about the journey that happens within a music album. Like a book, an album is experienced over time, and progressed through as a succession of chapters or songs, which are each artistic moments in themselves and which, strung together, form a place to go. This impulse to create a place through parts speaks to a sense of life as the gathering and coexistence of fragments; fragments building on each other. And more, it reveals a fascination with construction, with making and our capacity for artifice. I've begun to feel a tension between this desire to make specimens, and another to create a wild, mystical space. Typically dealing with humble subject matter, such as weeds or cracks or crumpled paper, I cultivate the magical in the mundane. I try to cast a spell through repetition.
The object-ness of my work is significant. Materiality -- the line on paper, the textures of paint, the substance of support surfaces -- remains a most exciting thing about art for me. Furthermore, I see my work as functional. I feel, increasingly, that it has always been about an inner world, and I think what I try to make are playgrounds or sanctuaries for the mind. When I suggest that the work could be functional, I mean that it could act as a physical extension of an interior world. I want a place where thing collect and ferment, constructed through mark and forcing away from intellect and society and survival into a safe realm where one's own thoughts and experiences are all that matter.
My work is about walking. I want to make something you approach. Not image on wall, but a clotted and mumbling thing you stumble upon in the forest.