I am interested in how the perception of a place is created. A Place is a collection of human experiences in a location. It is full of history but challenged by contradictory memories. There are both broad areas and tiny points that become places, real or imagined. They can be rooted in a landscape or nestled in a building. Places are special because they are shared, and they are precarious because they are always challenged by conflicting perceptions.
I intend for my sculptures to be a collection of the garishly obvious and the quietly pleasing experiences of place. I use colored porcelain because it offers me the ability to achieve balance and tension among independent patterns and united fields of color. My sculptures are composed of a variety of cast and hand-built forms. Each form is designed to represent a physical or emotional aspect of a real object, body, or plant. Some of the forms are literal representations, and others are altered by memory and perception. These forms are piled and compressed together creating the same dark lines, shadows, and cracks that our bodies can sense when moving across the earth.
A group of my sculptures called Land Body is inspired by a collection of visual and social experiences from our broad American place. These sculptures are about the experience shared between our bodies and the immense landscape. Colors and patterns on these sculptures are like clothing, flowers, or rhythmic conversations that become the colorful jewels of the experiences of people and places. For a large number of us, the American experience requires us to move across our home country, and abroad, multiple times for education and work. Our American place becomes an extensive collection of landscapes, social interactions, and memories. Wide ranging experiences slam together to form one inclusive unit that both defines and questions what our American place is.
Four years ago I moved to Little Elm, Texas. During the nine years previous to living here, I moved between eleven different cities across this country with a short stay in Taiwan sandwiched in the middle. My Land Body series certainly has been shaped by my experiences living and working in all of these places. Since I have been in Little Elm, I have had the pleasure of slowing down and observing the intimate details that make places in Texas distinctly unique within the broad American landscape. Much of my most recent sculptures have been about specific local Texas places: people, buildings, cities, and regions.