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Your process and materials are very unique. Can you describe how you create your pieces?
My work is typically made with wire, wire mesh, and sometimes wood or paper. The wire and wire mesh are my most typical choices for forms. Once I get the small forms, I typically then coat with encaustic medium, which is unpigmented encaustic (beeswax with damar resin). This builds the form and transforms the somewhat industrial materials into something organic and irregular. After a few layers without color, I then add color which can be a single color or varied layers or patterns of color.
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Where do you find your inspiration?
I am inspired by nature most predominantly. For years and years, I would take photos of plans, mushrooms, lichen and odd things found in nature. I was drawn to the delicate and ephemeral quality of the natural world and the way different species live harmoniously together.
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How do you decide your color selections?
Each arrangement invites a new opportunity to explore color and consider how color and form work together to communicate something. I am drawn to vibrant colors often but also feel a strong sensitivity to the way color conjures emotional qualities or associations. In the end it can often be a very intuitive process where instinct leads me but other times I will have a color combination in mind that I want to see how it looks together or what associations the given combination will bring up when I look at it.
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Let’s deep dive into one of your featured works, HOURS, DAYS, WEEKS IN THE BRIGHT LIGHT, 2022. What is this work about?
These circular pieces started with the 24 outer elements. The number 24 of course connects in to the number of hours in the day, plus with this form being circular suggests cycles. My work is also very situated within a practice of small daily acts of making. I don’t always get long stretches of time but often build pieces or groupings over time so the notion of time seem always hovering in my mind. This piece started with 3 pigments (Cobalt Teal, Cad. Yellow light, Alizarine Crimson) to look at the shift in color with mixing these three pigment to make a gradient that felt like a fluid and steady shift from one to the other. As I worked on this the vibrancy of the colors kept suggesting bright light whereas one of the others from this series seem to suggest different times and places. This is the thing with color that is endlessly facinating to artists - color’s ability to suggest something or create association.
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What direction do you see your work moving forward? Can you talk about your new paper series?
I often do daily projects when I have a new question or want to investigate a new processes or ideas. This allows me to build a deeper understanding of the given process and allows ideas to percolate while exploring. The paper pieces are still so new that I am not 100% sure where I am going with them. I can see small intimate pieces of individual components but I am also seeing larger installations or different types of arrangements, like suspended pieces potentially. The paper is so delicate and ephemeral feeling and yet so sturdy at the same time, that has been fun to explore. I am also enjoying the translucent quality of the paper when I coat it with wax. The folding process yields qualities and forms I haven’t used before and yet they feel connected to prior metal mesh pieces. These feel like an extention of the prior work and also allow the work to evolve in some new directions.
