Because I am an artist, I notice and appreciate visual complexity as I move through my world: shadows intersecting with light, lines overlapping with shapes, colors vibrating, unexpected patterns forming in a flattened space. All of this harmonizes within my interiority, as a pleasure or as a disturbance, making a subtle rhyme with my thoughts and feelings, aligning with memory and desire, and rising in a wave of expression that is my art.
Once the outer stimulus goes inside, the process becomes somewhat hidden and mysterious, but that is where the work finds its strength and capability of connecting with others. Like an archaeologist, I return with an object of curiosity, an object of delight and great worth, and when you see it you might say, “Oh yeah, I’ve felt like that before…” It’s somewhere you have been also, but may have forgotten until now. In this way abstraction can weave an intriguing open-ended story, without characters, without setting, outside of time, yet still be tangible and real. It can suggest a metaphor of transformation, or evoke a mood of hope and good humor, a feeling of mystery, contemplation or quiet solitude, or a sense of emotional equilibrium.
About the assemblages in resin: Beginning in 2016 I worked for three years as a school custodian. During my workday I picked up broken pencils, twisted paper clips, marker caps and other discarded objects, and often found them still in my pockets when I got home at night. One day I realized: these things are visual elements-- colors, shapes, lines-- that I can make art with! I developed a way of putting these components together with epoxy resin, and began creating a body of work that helped me to sustain an artistic practice that arose directly from the least creative job I’d ever had.
I find the materials to be very inspiring in themselves, and in very distinct and often surprising ways. For instance, I am not usually drawn to expressing nostalgic feeling in my work, but something of that comes forth when I work with the pencils… There is an emotive aspect to these simple, discarded, often broken tools, which every one of us has used since we were kids, that gets expressed as I play with various combinations, rhythms, repetitions, patterns, sizes, etc. Somehow they tend to tell small wordless stories that bring a little memory or smile to the forefront.
The marker and pen caps are exciting to me in yet another way. Placing different colors and sizes together expresses a musical note, chord or melody to me, either harmonious or discordant, major or minor… And so, many of those have been given titles with musical connotations, such as “Bright Chord”, “Nocturne” or “Jazz”.
I want my art to evoke an experience, an awareness, a mood or excitement that mirrors my own as I am creating it. I am also attracted to the way abstraction expresses emotion in an open-ended fashion, and feel these resin pieces offer that in an intimate and understated way. In a wider sense I hope these works bring attention to just how much stuff gets thoughtlessly thrown away, finding its way into the landfill, a roadside ditch or the massive islands of floating plastic refuse in our oceans. At least in this case, it's found its way into my art!
