Artist Statement

Each substance surrounding us is dynamic and ever-changing; none is fixed or inert. It has grown or compounded or coalesced into its current state, and will continue to react or devolve or deliquesce into future states. In my studio, I put substances into reactive situations to elicit change. Such as water: it flows, transmits, subsumes, and skips fleetingly from one state of matter to the next. Materials are what they do.

I provoke, observe, and catch moments of flux like an alchemist prodding at nature to reveal her secrets. But rather than demystifying the natural world, I hope to re-mystify it. To remind myself of the myriad, wondrous potentialities surrounding and suffusing us. Words are not adequate to represent the potency of materials, nor the particular, personal embodied knowledge gleaned by working with them. This type of embodied knowing is artisanry. A collaborative, improvisatory practice of following the grain and going with the flow of materiality. A body of knowledge.

I focus on plant colorants, both cultivated and foraged from marginal ‘wasteland’. The area along the lower Hudson River where I live and work, the ancestral lands of the Lenni Lenape, has a history disjointed by tides of colonization, industrialization, inequity, and unfolding climate crisis. In this landscape of disturbance and imbalance, ruderal and invasive plant species spring up. These wayward plants are vilified but resilient in a changing ecosystem, and unbounded by nets of relationship. To find beauty and utility within them is to draw them into relational bonds. Their colors, obtained through the enactment of collaboration and slow accrual of relationship, represent dynamic regeneration and root my artistic practice to place.