Think about biting into cake

I identify with you in a way.

Each of my forms pushes back against over-simplification of emotions. The method in which I fire and refire, add elements, and manipulate glaze and color, creates a saturated excess. Every piece challenges frivolity, teasing gratification, and demanding a moment of reflective vulnerability.

I invite conversations about being spoiled and greedy and overdone and grotesque and excessive.

It creates a visual and visceral paradox for the audience, much like a poisonous frog: simultaneously alluring in with color and texture, while also seeming to slither and harm.

My sculptures offer engorging contradictions, like those in a deteriorated romance, a selfish child, a moldy sweet, or a bite out of thick white fondant.

I work with my own loud and active femininity in a way that engages a viewer with apprehension and curiosity. My work reflects an indulgence and overload of beauty.

They are not soft.

They challenge the conventional symbolism imposed on flowers as professions of love (and only the good parts of love). They acknowledge that love is multifaceted and ephemeral.

They are missions to find my own visual happiness.

 

I’m tugging on the string of what it means to be cringe. Is it born out of us navigating the ambiguous, or is it more reactionary? I am excited by interpersonal relationships and the physically empty space that connections exist in. It can’t be held but it is seen, and yet we can’t agree on where it is. 

I like to make people nervous. 

So I dangle delicate porcelain pieces on a wall. My forms jut out like a fragile shelf and push away from the vertical pedestal that promises security, taunting the reactions of preciousness from their audience. Nervousness means we care. We fret about the consequences of not intervening. Or we slink away from cringe. We treat low-impact negative behavior like an infection, but I never catch myself until it’s too late. I’ve shared my germs by accident and didn’t mean to offend. 

So I gather repeated shapes presented in different outerwear and ask why each one reads differently than the next. I make funny, bumpy forms gathered into groups like communities. With only one element changed amongst the individuals, I sleuth to find the invisible reason of what within the context attracts, tickles, or is averse. 

My sculptures lure you closer but threaten your touch. They offer awkward yet compulsory reactions,  like how we respond to misplaced hyper-energy, watching a romantic fight, embarrassment, or candy covered in hair. Slink, but keep looking. 

My relationship with the wall as a platform brings undulating baubles and jagged fins up to your face. My relationship with reworking within repetition, begs you to question your taste. Something sweet in a character is offensive when it shows up outside the gallery, and my work is a cast that only delights at a distance. And is it that space in-between, where you have your experience?

Interconnections excite me because I am striving to understand what I didn’t see at first. 

They are missions to find community in discomfort.