On being an artist –
It’s hard because I choose this. Any day. It’s the only way. And also it is like exposing all my nerves to the gentle breeze. Which I can take. But damn, sometimes — it grips me while it also frees me.
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My work is about harnessing personal power to break free.
For as long as I can remember, pressing in on me from all angles was the insidious mantra: Be Repressed. As a young girl, I internalized that message spatially: “Become small. Stay small.” Repression feels like what happens when a spring is compressed: the spring contracts and energizes to release with explosive power. My art is my empowered release into expansion, if I am the compressed spring.
I am obsessed with the presence of stark contrasts in one form because of the dichotomies in my own psyche and existence. For a form to be more than one thing at once, for it to possess contrasting qualities that reveal the complexity of its being: that is what I am after.
I torque, tie, stretch, and stitch my materials with the force of emotional experience. I often use a contrast of soft, raw textiles and hard, industrial metal, creating shapes and forms reminiscent of body parts like intestines, bones, muscles, and skin. The visceral energy embedded in the work requires an emotional response from the viewer and declares the complexity and power of the Self, an otherwise intangible force of human existence that is too commonly denied.