My work is my way to make sense of the human condition. As I contemplate our impact on the natural world, the injustices we inflict upon ourselves, and the hardships that we face, I am drawn to the beauty that emerges from our struggles. The pursuit of a sterile, pain-free beauty promoted in our modern culture is at odds with reality and is an act of denial that turns reality, itself, into a casualty—along with all the other casualties for which we are responsible. My work aims to expose the beauty of struggle. This type of beauty is painful to contemplate and accept, but it lives within the core of our resilience and hope.

Similarly, I find the harshness of impermanence and change, beautiful. I instinctively gravitate towards elements and objects that have been around for a long time and that are riddle with scars. These scars are the imprint and charged record of time and the forces that shape us. My practice of fragmenting and eroding, of creating my own weather, is my attempt to both understand and accept impermanence. By deconstructing and fragmenting my pieces and subjecting my surfaces to forces that mimic the passage of time I internalize and gain a more visceral understanding of the natural forces that are constantly transforming, reclaiming, and redefining matter. Central to my art, is showing how impermanence, loss and rebirth are part of nature. To this effect, I want my work to embody the materiality of erosion and carry the charge and essence of loss. The process by which I meticulously build, alter, destroy, recycle, and re-envision my work is part of my ritual, my meditation, my spiritual practice.

In my current project, an on-site installation title “Erosive Tension” I continue to push the boundaries of my practice to tackle the Anthropocene. The term implies that our impact on our planet will be recognizable in a geological context long after we are gone. Much like the churning dynamics that define the Anthropocene and our times, my practice continues to evolve and grow, absorbing elements from site-specificity, new-materialism, and phenomenology and juxtaposing and recombining them, creating new innovative interplays that contribute to the investigations of a new generation of site-specific practitioners. Erosive Tension merges elements normally associated with “site” vs. “non-site” by combining natural and artificial factors in a single location. In this project, I address the socio-political and cultural complexities inherent in both the site and my examination of our future. The phenomenological impact of the viewer’s direct experience in the space is crucial to addressing the tension between the human and natural forces at play. The social and institutional dynamics present a historical arc that exposes the explosive impact of human growth during the industrial revolution, the subsequent institutional decay and neglect that followed and the present-day effort to restore and stem the tide of nature’s reclamation. With this work, I am exploring our legacy in terms of the artifacts and ruins we leave behind and challenging the untarnished ideals promoted by our consumer-based culture in the hopes of exposing some of the complexities and problems we face today.