Artist statement
The world abounds with fascinating materials, transformative processes and new innovations. As a visual artist and creator of three-dimensional things, I delight in it all. My artwork often begins by an initial attraction to a particular material, experimenting with its physical qualities and transformative potential. In the studio, I use artistic processes on everyday materials and craft techniques on traditional art supplies, mixing methodologies in order to encourage discovery and innovation. These initial experiments then develop into artworks and series – sculptures, installations, objects, videos, photographs, or performances. Aware of my Protestant tendencies toward monotonous labour, I create projects that satisfy this desire; requiring cutting, folding, stitching, sorting, and assembling.
As an internationally active artist, I became aware of the fact that my work was more often than not seen as a digital image online or printed in a catalogue. I began to think about the relationship between image and object, space, location and time. This sparked my interest in dimensions – specifically the mathematical relationship between one, two, three and four dimensions. I used this knowledge to invent processes and techniques to translate objects and spaces from one dimension to another. The resulting works used cameras to flatten three dimensional objects and spaces, resurrecting the lost third dimensions through physical modifications – cutting and layering. I also created works that enabled the viewer to see three dimensions in three actual dimensions, using reflections to show multiple views of a single object concurrently.
For the past two decades I have been a perpetual foreigner, living and working in many different cultures and situations. On one hand, the creation of artwork is a way for me to situate myself in a place, to understand its aesthetics, social constructs and physical landscape. On the other hand, my position has made me ultra-conscious of the context in which my work is seen and the information that accompanies it. My work is not often seen as simply an artwork, but as a reaction from American artist living in …. Sometimes I seek to play with these expectations; other times I neutralise any references to space and place, to focus solely on the materials and processes themselves.
As a whole, my work combines my love of diverse materials, attentiveness to craft, playfulness in scale, and thoughtful reaction to place and context.