Meaning is a promise.

Matter is metaphorical.

Every sculpture is a sentence in a foreign language.

The world ventriloquizes.

Copying is loving.

Language is a sculpture.

Making sculpture is like building a home.

My work is nestled between the conflicting realities of play and terror associated with making human sense out of matter.

I am interested in the relation between language and objects. My sculptural practice draws from conceptual and linguistic models to test the structure of meaning, the opportunities of embedding it in the world and its possibility as a shared, relational value. The sculptures are assemblies of common, everyday, and construction materials. The objects within them live surprising and distinct lives as I examine their part-to-whole and surface-to-depth relationships and interrogate their capacity to carry meaning. I use elementary epistemological questions (what is it? Is it what it purports to be?) as pretexts to ask questions about the nature of objects and the way they create a shared space of interaction.

The works are often organized around a formal metaphor of surface and depth, or ‘container.’  The physical or “imagined” boundary sets the terms of engagement and sets up a delay, extending understanding into a process and complicating access to meaning. No title, or Conditions of Engagement is a large, white, hollow wall whose closed-off interior is available only through a video feed on a personal phone. Father is a shelter, access to which is prohibited by a wall of bricks. Phone’s screen is blank, undermining trust in its proper functioning. An almost entirely dark and silent room sets up the boundary to experiencing the piece in Very Dark Room With Nothing to See. In these works depth, weight, volume, interior - all lay out the conceptual topography of meaning and desire, as it is embedded in the materiality of the works. By delineating the negative or blank space and frustrating readability of the work I seek to define value in the “unsaid.”

My work is a search for intimacy with the viewer. Each sculpture is a means of conversation with the viewer, and has specific durational character. The most successful of the works, and those most rewarding to me, manage to be sites of inscription, where the audience can project into and onto, thus completing the piece.

Longer version for the patient reader.