Artist Statement
Packed Up
Inspiration for my recent work comes from numerous experiences with the past and present. The landscape of the rural southeast and dilapidated, abandoned relics of lives past are a driving force behind my recent images of distorted homes. Nature reclaiming a place and homes returning to nature, breaking their elements down into dirt and dust, fill the empty landscape. Voided dark interiors hold little information of the former inhabitants. Flat wallpaper patterns become the vines and trees that now call the structure home. Piles of objects that are indistinguishable construct a burial mound for lives and times past. Chimneys rise like tombstones from the landscape. Layers on my prints build up like dust on the mantel.
Nostalgia…wistful longing…fascination…absence…home…
Remembrances
This collection is the photographic documentation of homes and places from across the southeast that I have used as inspiration for my work. While I generally envision photography to be a source for finished works, there is a poetry and poignancy to many of these images that I have captured that cannot be ignored. It is true that a picture can say a thousand words. These photographs are ones that were combined to create the installation Constructed, Loved, Abandoned, Resurrected (2011) at Leu Gallery in Nashville, TN.
Inevitable Forces
My work is a complex, multi-layered response to the surrounding environment, the relationship between man and nature, and perception of human impact on it. It is a depiction of my uncertainty and anxiousness about experiences through external sources, such as the media, interactions with the environment, and people. The desire to control apprehensive occurrences manifests itself as a tendency to depict order in my work. I try to reach a balance with my own doubts and fears, relating to growth and spreading on the micro and macroscopic level, passage of time, death, and change. My passion for the environment drives the concepts that relate man to nature, comparing two living organisms and forming a relationship. The work is an orchestrated snapshot of a cause and effect relationship, a scenario where two different forces are combined to insinuate a query.
The main concept in the body of work revolves around alteration of the environment to conform to human needs and the futile attempts to control natural and/or inevitable forces. Organic forms represent harmful and invasive diseases, indicative of death, uncontrollable events in the natural work, and unconstrained spreading or sprawl. The organic shapes do not conform to the grids and structures that are organizational constraints imposed by humans in an attempt to regulate. Geometric forms represent the contained elements of human presence and systems of organization. Grids and structures directly related to the use of architecture, urban sprawl, and mapping, chiefly topographical maps. The use of different printmaking processes is representative of my control or lack of control over uncontrollable phenomenon in life that I attempt to control through process and the use of geometric grids and structures. The struggle of organic versus structure, and the desire to control the uncontrollable, is the unending battle that I am depicting.