Artist Statement
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, progression 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. However, a subtle tension between the organic and structured elements conveys an ominous presence or foreboding to an audience through a sense of chaos and expansion, or confinement and claustrophobia. 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 this 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 world, 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 element of human presence and systems of organization. Grids and structures directly relate to the use of architecture, urban sprawl, and mapping, chiefly topographic maps.
My use of the printmaking processes is parallel to my concepts of control or lack of control. The process itself becomes a representation of control or lack of control. Uncontrollable phenomenon in life, like change, passage of time, growth, and death, become the events in my work that I attempt to control through the printmaking 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.