Artist Statement
My work strives to contextualize the world around me through the utilization of craft processes. Contextualization entails investigating how pieces of the past: discarded objects, obsolete processes, and forgotten indexes have come to be forgotten, and what role they may serve today. Craft processes are the basis of my contextualization. Old tools, methods and a hands-on approach to working are my connections to the analogue of the past. I am drawn to the ideas of fracturing and recontextualization present in traditions of black-and-white film, surrealism, and postmodernism.
Using craft, I bring the beauty of the past into the present through the specificity of “traditional processes” of creation whether it be using chisels, gouges, planes or saws to slowly work away at a piece of work, using analogue film and slides, or by gradually building up tones by making dozens of layers of graphite and charcoal. I inform my processes of creation based on a rejection of today’s rapid culture. We are more than internet culture, disposable culture, urbanization, or instant gratification. With my work comes a celebration of beauty through acknowledgment of the time-consuming process of creating. I ask the viewer to slow down, to ponder, to appreciate the beauty of old processes. Film, wood, metal, and paper are among the materials most effective for this task. My work is tactile; something you can hold and interact with whose qualities don’t transfer through a screen.
Materiality is integral to the process of slowing down. It is unable to be digested in its entirety though digitalization. Instead, it physically encourages the cultivation of personal relationships. In a society so focused on moving forward there is a need to slow down and acknowledge the past. The world is not stark, clean, or “modern”.