Artist Statement

Using mostly mass-produced materials and improvised processes, I make abstract sculptures that can have unexpected vulnerability, and at the same time, a strong presence, playfulness and a sense of motion. I like the sculptures to have vulnerability, as it allows the potential for the viewer to feel themselves reflected in the work, and thereby makes space for potential connection. We relate to the sculptures as other bodies or even as other beings. The sculptures are not pre-planned, rather their forms evolve organically as I respond to the materials, shapes and compositions in the work. Each piece is complete when it feels like it has integrity and can exist on its own.
I’m excited by the idea of a viewer remembering how it felt to experience a work, rather than necessarily remembering what a work looked like. So, the memory of sensation is what you have.
Drawing and printmaking for me are experimental and a way of thinking; allowing me to explore abstract sculptural forms in space on a 2-dimensional surface. The drawings/prints and the sculptures have in common the constant adding and subtracting of materials in the process of their making.
The anthropomorphic/biomorphic sculptures were made using fibreglass, epoxy resins and putties, paper maché clay, along with glues, paints, charcoal, pencil crayons, fabric, and scrap metal as well as the main ingredient, cardboard. Lately I’ve been experimenting with making my sculptures in clay. The drawings are made with charcoal and black and white gessos on panels. Monotypes are painted with oil-based inks on plexiglass and printed by etching press on dampened Hannemüle Copperplate paper.
The history of my practice involves many years of printmaking, printing letterpress books, painting and drawing, making stop motion videos, and eventually sculpting. I spent many years deeply exploring stop motion photography and short films of the late 1800s including the 1896 short film available on YouTube of Loïe Fuller’s dance filmed by the Lumière Brothers, The Serpentine Dance. The dancer waves fabric around creating feminine abstract forms. I consider these forms to show the female body from the female point of view. “What does it feel like to live in a body?” is a question I explore in the work.
Today, I consider my practice to be an experimental intuitive multi-disciplinary one, based in materials and allowing the process of making to show in the finished work. The primary ideas at the centre of my practice are temporality, movement, and an overall obsession with visceral responses to visual art. I relate to my works as physical, wordless poems. I consciously make space to allow for extra-verbal conversations between viewer and work/work and viewer.