Artist Statement
Process - process as work, as labour, as the manipulation of materials, as the transformation of one element into another; and process as learning, as the gaining and dissemination of knowledge- has always been an important component of my work. The objects that I make reflect a history of their own making. In their "hand-madeness" the individual hand/body becomes a body of work that speaks of the instrumentality of daily life. I am attracted to labour intensive ways of working in which slow, repetitive or obsessive activity gradually creates a surface or builds a form.
My work always evokes human presence through surrogates. For a number of years I have been working with references to books and tools. Earlier references have included clothing and architecture.
My work juxtaposes cultural artifacts with nature. My interest in not in nature as "natural" but in nature as the site of complex, contradictory processes of manipulation and idealizations expressive of a desire to be connected, to make order, to find a pattern. My work embodies these hopeful desires while at the same time encoding the melancholy, anxious distance that separates us from their fulfillment.