Artist Statement

I create wall-hung plaster objects and fabric collages that examine domestic experience as a space with the capacity to offer safety, support risk, and stand in for the permeability of the body.

Fabric is inherently architectural in its ability to define and organize space, and at the same time inherently flexible. While referencing the stable, rectilinear character of archetypal Western dwellings and conceiving of the home as a kind of armor, my collages also use frayed edges, lumpy surfaces, and misalignment to disrupt convention, allowing for difference and creating openings. I search out forms that are at once foundational and full of potential.

I foreground touch and listening. Imprinted with the surfaces and shapes my hands create as I make, my plaster objects take inspiration from a particular Iron Age Etruscan votive ear in the Harvard Museum collection. The ear is teardrop-shaped and recognizable as a body part while being awkward in its inexactness. Here, the cochlea—where sound enters the body—is darkly mysterious, a portal to the realm of inner life.

Alternately, textures may be volcanic, with air pockets like those created when molten lava pours out of the earth’s center, their crevices serving as vessels for pooled color.

Evolving from unseen minutiae of domestic life, the shapes I find begin with the sounds of being at home and the feelings they elicit. Aural indices of home's familiar hum become shapes whose strength reflects the value of these signifiers of well-being. Interdependent with feelings, sound can nourish, repel, mark time, and shift with the weather. Ever present, it eludes direct observation and like home, feels internal and external at once.

These pieces exist within a threshold between inner and outer, the protective and the permeable. They consider home as a space both ordinary and special, with its sounds that shape us, its spaces that shelter and hold, and its capacity to transform the mundane into the sacred.