Artist Statement

I create sculptures which are abstract, somewhat figurative objects that we can relate to on a gut level, beyond words. As a child, I spent summers on a small island near Vancouver and often found myself relating to the ocean as I sat next to it. I had a gut feeling of connection to people in other countries on the same big ocean, of connection to all things, a pleasant sensation of heaviness in my body and mind, and a feeling like I was part of the rock I was sitting on and part of the sea I was looking at. I think I was meditating before I knew what that was. In the same way, I think a powerful experience with art doesn’t always leave a visual memory—it leaves a physical sensation.

My work is process and material driven. I don’t have a vision of what the work will look like when I start, but rather follow my curiosity and the demands of the materials and of the process. Each piece is complete when it feels like it has its own integrity and can exist in the world with its own agency. The simple materials from which the sculptures are made (cardboard, paint, charcoal, scrap metal, clay and fabric) are pointing to the ordinary extraordinariness of the embodied experience.

The forms have evolved through previous years of deeply exploring stop motion photography and short films of the late 1800’s, particularly the short film of Loïe Fuller’s dance performed by an unknown dancer filmed by the Lumière Brothers, in which she waves fabric forming all sorts of abstract anthropomorphic shapes. The question, “what does it feel like to live in a body?”, is one I like to explore in my work. I have an obsession and excitement for abstract postures, and gestures in the work, and for the work seeming to be in motion although it is still.