Artist Statement

Making art brings me great joy. It’s awfully addicting. A lot of my love for ceramics (which so far has been a 20 year addiction) started in third grade, when I made a conch shell out of clay. My teachers really liked my work, and hearing this little bit of positive reinforcement has decided decades of my life. For better or for worse, here I am: the proud conch shell maker.

So many people, places, and things inspired me that I couldn’t possibly list them all. Of course nature is a constant inspiration, philosophy, and source of activism. I’ve spent the last couple years with a lot of fear centering around ever-advancing and seemingly inescapable technology. A lot of my art has recently been about the fear of surveillance capitalism and the culture machine that we live in. It can be overwhelming and hard to get away from, and yet I want to see good happening in the world and feel that I am making it a better place.

In art I’m the storyteller. I’m creating a visual and right narrative with the idea of ultimately communicating empathy towards universally felt experiences, the kinds of experiences that aren’t reflected in narratives made by culture machines. I’m searching for catharsis to relate invisible experiences that you can’t find in manufactured stories.

The purpose of stories is to create catharsis. We’re all witnessing life and history unfold before our eyes, but the culture machines run by the media don’t authentically bear witness to these human experiences. In some ways we’ve lost the ability to have catharsis because we have this digital intermediary, and I’m searching to bear witness to that gap for myself.