Artist Statement

My work centers around the decay of memory and the altering of perception through repetitive processes and the creation of varied multiples. Easily swayed by the influence of a photograph or the retelling of a story, memories are ephemeral, often lost to a sea of repetition and recollection. Yet the mind is all that we are–our sense of self and our perception of the world–despite its overwhelming inaccuracy. My practice addresses the inevitability and absurdity of our reliance on a system as flawed as the mind. Equally as vital to my practice is the act of becoming completely engulfed in the process of making. Getting lost in repetition is what allows me to gain a deeper understanding of my work. I continue utilizing each image, form, and action of making until they become both everything and nothing; an insignificant part of the whole, yet so critical to my practice.

My approach to photography is that of a collector. I never go out intending to take photographs for use in my work, but rather to document my experience through time, whether that's a sense of place, home, sadness, or joy. I return to these images years later, finding new significance in the passing of time, or in the sentimentality created by revisiting them again and again.

This approach of collecting memories grew from a love of repetitive processes like knitting, weaving, and wood and metalworking. My constant accumulation of scraps and trash (both physical and metaphysical) often lead to other series, which act as records of eras in my life: expressed through materiality. During times of severe chronic illness I hyperfocus on knitting intricate lace patterns, attempting to lose myself in mathematics and repetition, to give my brain a rest  from  reality.  The  result is  often so complex  that  without these periods of intense fixation, I could not sit down and figure it out. Allowing myself to get lost in a process can expand my thinking beyond the conscious, and is a process I try to bring to all aspects of my making. During my summer intensive at Ox-Bow, I created an internally lit sculpture from the scraps of fellow students. It became a record of everyone I worked with, and the natural surroundings we worked in. 

Many of my large-scale repeating prints use imagery from where I grew up, or places that I have considered home. Newer works utilize digital scans, where I screen print, scan, and reprint an image over and over, each time introducing and accentuating mistakes and digitization. This creates not only a record of the physicality of printing at this scale, but also the translation between the digital and the physical, resulting in distorted color fields and moire patterns. Individual elements cease to be recognizable. The results mirror a sense of memory in general, an amalgamation of vibrant experiences and impressions, half-forgotten and re-remembered to the point of holding little resemblance to reality.