Artist Statement

My research combines environmentally sustainable materials and ethical collection rooted in social practice. Raised in a conservative, heteronormative Midwestern home, art became an outlet to explore my own purpose, identity, and gender. I became enamored with structural techniques of welding, woodworking, and metal casting initially because of the similarity to the manual labor associated with my parents’ blue collar work. My practice has evolved into interactive, large-scale sculptural installations that are assembled from found objects, prints of everyday life, and community-engaged research.

The memories and histories associated with discarded household objects are materials in my installations that discuss consumer culture, unsustainable materialism, arts accessibility, queer world-building, and homemaking through collections of non-archival installations. Cast shadow paper cut-outs, surreal false spaces, prints of refashioned architecture, distorted home decor, video projection and stacked assemblages of furniture are developed into sculptural environments to challenge ideas of social class systems, the inherent purpose of objects, and the irreverence of labor and everyday items. I deconstruct utilitarian found objects and domestic settings to reconstruct them in site-specific installations to reclaim engendered objects, themes, and roles. The labor intensive process is therapeutic, similar to piecing together aspects of my own memories through months of rehabilitation from a traumatic brain injury. I work through emotional memories and experiences with socially engaged art to reconcile self-other relations and question how art can respond to and heal psychological and collective trauma. The new installations are constructed with imagined function and purpose in unfamiliar, un-homely environments that describe the feeling of un-belonging in American, middle-class homes. Its haunting differences yet uncomfortable closeness build staged sets of non-spaces and uncanny potential sites for queer homemaking outside of current Western societal systems.