My practice seeks to highlight moments of suggested connection between the temporal landscape, the landscape of body and the internal landscape of the mind and to drift between these ideas fluidly. I construct art objects, stage interventions on nature, and attempt to document temporal situations. My work begins as projects, flexible and abstract experiments enacted to imbed my artistic body within the outer world. A natural conclusion or success for my practice would be to see my work integrated back into the world at large and regenerated in some way. I approach my practice and these projects as performative weekly or daily habit. With this kind of repetitive engagement, a phenomenological relationship and framework has formed within my practice. Perspective, wonderment, and reflection are at the core of how I approach making art.
My practice and resulting work often take on digital forms like video, animation, and still images. The art objects that come from these projects remain non archival and not suited to traditional art environments. The work requires viewers to become participants in the unravelling of linear time and to situate themselves in an ephemeral world. I position my work as not wholly performative or installation art. I am a situational artist, someone who crafts situations and projects whose meaning is broadened and revealed through the intervention of nature, the unfinished world.
Much of the subject of this work is around the topic of domestic spaces, which become metaphor for the human body. Domestic space is an embodied space, shaped and effected by quotidian tasks. The body is both the inspiration for and reflected in the home dwelling. We build the homes that are inspired by our body’s desires and needs. Influenced by our personal and historical definition of home and domestic concerns. The walls of our homes become mirrors of ourselves, a written document of our bodies in the home space.
The home is also a mind space, a delineation of external and internal. What is within the home and what is not becomes an extension of our psychology, what is within us and what is not. Home can never remain the same, vulnerable and penetrable. The home is precarious shelter built to create a sense of security, a dream of safety. And yet home is a memory space a fixed notion, a location, a building, a physical structure that can outlast us.
In my art I trace the construction and deconstruction of domestic space and watch the effect time has on dwelling spaces. My practice attempts different strategies to focus on this subject. I expect that while my interest and understanding of the domestic grows, so too might my practice shift perspectives and mediums. But for the moment, I employ stop motion animation and moving image to capture these transitional moments in the home. With my moving image work, the camera is observational, allowing the scene to unfold and for the viewer to immerse themselves in long extended takes. Typically, soft calm aesthetic where subjects move in and out of focus.
Alternatively, when using stop motion animation, time is interrupted and the image changes only slightly from a second before. This jump and gap allows the viewer the chance to grasp the radical changes that happen before our eyes, each second of the day in the natural world. I reflect on the rhythms and practice of animation as a form dwelling. The process of creating the animation is methodical, like a repetitive action and experiment. I inch a strand of fiber forward or build a pile of picked flowers then I step back to capture a photo. I release the shutter and repeat the gesture within the camera delay. This creates a habitual rhythm within these stills, the ground is trod and there is urgency to my performative role. The memory of this practice locates my presence, though invisible, throughout the animations.