About Me, My Work, and Eye
I started my intellectual journey by dropping out of a disappointing state college to perform with a traveling commedia dell’arte political theater company based in New Haven, CT. After a year and a half I’d learned to juggle and that I needed to understand Marxism better before I continued to espouse it. I transferred to Bard College to resume my studies and found my people in the art and writing departments. Learning to weld and work in steel was liberating. With that freedom came questions. My work since has focused on exploring questions like: how do we know what we know? What makes something funny or poignant? Why are diagonals so dynamic? My questions and interests branch in a variety of directions, but there are two constants in play: we have bodies and we make things with materials.
Having bodies gives us predilections you can see in everything from our sense of scale (intimate, normal, monumental) to how we impose dualism on experience (mind/body; self/other; left/right; good/bad/ black/white; etc.). This is a rich but formal way of thinking. On the other hand, musing on materials means operating in the realm of reverie. The raw and refined stuff around us can have broad associations, cultural and emotional connotations, and when multiple things are put together entirely new connections are added.
Curiously, or perversely, since I am practically innumerate, I have a deep interest in math and science. I love to read about (and look at the pictures of) things like Euler’s work on polyhedra and topology, and the many people who have contributed to the fields of fractals, chaos, and complexity. I am attracted to Wittgenstein’s insight that language can bewitch our thinking and how Gödel shows that some truths cannot be proved. These sorts of concepts have made me notice things more closely and openly. I love Brecht’s Galileo for its dramatization of how seeing something familiar afresh, like a swinging lamp, can shift one’s understanding.
I earned an MFA in sculpture from Hunter College and continued to make art while supporting myself working in multimedia and publishing. Eventually, I needed to earn more money and took a hiatus from studio work. Recently I resumed full-time studio work. Since then I’ve downsized my work but not my ambition. Years ago I made Are the Stars Out Tonight? which was an 8-foot-tall dress you could stand inside of and look out of through a telescope. A recent series I completed also uses fabric. Works in my Cave Series are tabletop-sized. I use heavy black fabric quilted over a core of shoddy (recycled remnants) to create wrapped volute spaces cinched at the back. Their fronts have differing bamboo grills. Within the hollow spaces I place geometric and/or representational forms made of humble materials like plaster and paper clay. They all have referents I hint at, but don’t impose.
I think of what I do as making anchor spaces for the imagination.
Having bodies gives us predilections you can see in everything from our sense of scale (intimate, normal, monumental) to how we impose dualism on experience (mind/body; self/other; left/right; good/bad/ black/white; etc.). This is a rich but formal way of thinking. On the other hand, musing on materials means operating in the realm of reverie. The raw and refined stuff around us can have broad associations, cultural and emotional connotations, and when multiple things are put together entirely new connections are added.
Curiously, or perversely, since I am practically innumerate, I have a deep interest in math and science. I love to read about (and look at the pictures of) things like Euler’s work on polyhedra and topology, and the many people who have contributed to the fields of fractals, chaos, and complexity. I am attracted to Wittgenstein’s insight that language can bewitch our thinking and how Gödel shows that some truths cannot be proved. These sorts of concepts have made me notice things more closely and openly. I love Brecht’s Galileo for its dramatization of how seeing something familiar afresh, like a swinging lamp, can shift one’s understanding.
I earned an MFA in sculpture from Hunter College and continued to make art while supporting myself working in multimedia and publishing. Eventually, I needed to earn more money and took a hiatus from studio work. Recently I resumed full-time studio work. Since then I’ve downsized my work but not my ambition. Years ago I made Are the Stars Out Tonight? which was an 8-foot-tall dress you could stand inside of and look out of through a telescope. A recent series I completed also uses fabric. Works in my Cave Series are tabletop-sized. I use heavy black fabric quilted over a core of shoddy (recycled remnants) to create wrapped volute spaces cinched at the back. Their fronts have differing bamboo grills. Within the hollow spaces I place geometric and/or representational forms made of humble materials like plaster and paper clay. They all have referents I hint at, but don’t impose.
I think of what I do as making anchor spaces for the imagination.