Along with flashbacks to twisted reoccurring dreams, my work is an investigation into my past, a recollection of my childhood and the difficulties of becoming an adult. As I child, I secluded myself from the neighborhood kids. I built forts and played house, always feeling alone, forbidding anyone to enter without a password. I would spend hours of playtime creating codes and secret languages for myself. Big on storytelling, daily imaginative solitude absorbed the early days. This idea is activated and reflected in my work through images that stand as secret codes themselves. My childhood is much like the town I grew up in, Augusta, Georgia is a place of memories lost in the shadows of reinvention, people and establishments caught up in the “beauty” of profitable construction. Abandoned buildings stand haunted by the life that once inhabited them. Cultural and architectural growth occupies space around these dilapidated structures, just as a dirt dauber nest rests upon a wall or ceiling. More recently, I am weighed down by the realization that humans live as passers-by in a heavy world, hustling and bustling to subsist in an interesting existence. We are making ends meet with left-behind reminiscences, all the while demanding a sense of security, a delicate and empty dwelling, a poorly constructed socio-interactive bubble.
The work produced as of late is difficult to be seen as a strictly singular medium. I see myself as a mixed media artist, controlling and manipulating materials to integrate as a whole. The paintings inform the sculptures, and the sculptures often do the same. Interdisciplinary production is key in presenting a relationship between specific memory-triggering materials. The texture of paint and clay is deliciously ugly, and through the use of teardrops, blood, hair, and other recognizable bodily discharge imagery, the variety of work I produce becomes more human with passing time. As frequently as the stitching can be seen in the attachment of fabric strips to canvas, symbolic bars of painted color stretch from one point to another as a representation of emotion and experiential connection and growth. Using fabrics and sewing techniques seem to bring about some sort of domestic gender role issue, reflecting back to the gender tension of child play. Some images float above a dark shadow, lifted above no supportive ground, creating a sense of levitation to a higher, freethinking place, a situation I have materialized from a needy, restrained state of mind.
I have recently connected my own being with the nest-inspired forms and imagery in my work. Paint, clay, and other materials now serve as a voice, permitting me to speak through my work. As I am under pressure to get through this age stage, the art-making process allows me to learn what is real and of worth in an inadequately constructed psyche dwelling.
The work produced as of late is difficult to be seen as a strictly singular medium. I see myself as a mixed media artist, controlling and manipulating materials to integrate as a whole. The paintings inform the sculptures, and the sculptures often do the same. Interdisciplinary production is key in presenting a relationship between specific memory-triggering materials. The texture of paint and clay is deliciously ugly, and through the use of teardrops, blood, hair, and other recognizable bodily discharge imagery, the variety of work I produce becomes more human with passing time. As frequently as the stitching can be seen in the attachment of fabric strips to canvas, symbolic bars of painted color stretch from one point to another as a representation of emotion and experiential connection and growth. Using fabrics and sewing techniques seem to bring about some sort of domestic gender role issue, reflecting back to the gender tension of child play. Some images float above a dark shadow, lifted above no supportive ground, creating a sense of levitation to a higher, freethinking place, a situation I have materialized from a needy, restrained state of mind.
I have recently connected my own being with the nest-inspired forms and imagery in my work. Paint, clay, and other materials now serve as a voice, permitting me to speak through my work. As I am under pressure to get through this age stage, the art-making process allows me to learn what is real and of worth in an inadequately constructed psyche dwelling.
