Artist's Statement

My artistic practice is grounded on a desire to connect people with their immediate surroundings. Through my work I hope to bring about an awareness of the inter-dependency between these surroundings and each person's physical and psychological being.

I am inspired by materials and locations, and this is where all of my projects begin. Whether it be an environmental installation, film or other creation, location and materials determine the shape of the project. It is my interest in different materials and their particular qualities that has led me to experiment with many different artistic media.

My projects rely on a direct experience, an immediate physical response from the viewer. They are not conceptual in the sense of offering a topic to consider, but rather offer an intimate dialogue through sensory perception. They demand active participation, be it in the form of exploring secret passageways and hidden rooms or by taking in a fast, frame by frame experimental film collage.

I believe that the location of a work should be its primary determining factor. Each project I make is site-specific, as the project could not be the same if it were constructed or filmed in a different location. Materials are gathered from either the area surrounding the site of installation or from a location with historical, cultural, or personal importance. This ephemera, the evidence of the original location, are transported and transformed in the construction process and lend their histories to the final creation. The location itself creates a context which frames the project, offering its own history and its present-day situation to the work I have placed within it.

My recent projects have been on the subject of the house. I have built domestic spaces out of materials removed from people's homes. The way I build these spaces is to use very complex geometry, walls and ceilings and floors on angles, making movement through the space very difficult. This is meant to call attention to how the person as body interacts with the space, how different angular combinations create limitations or affordances, open up or close down on the body. I see the elements of the house as a tool to be used in manipulating and affecting a person inside it, as a heuristic device to understand the ways that the house and person interact and affect each other. These projects are a continuation of my interest in the relation between person and surroundings.

The work that I have been doing, and that I wish to continue, is searching for a link to an uncharted psychological world, one that exists within all people in some form. Perhaps a collective unconscious, or the deep origins of our beings, it is a phenomena which I believe connects not only people with their surroundings but also connects all entities, effacing all separations and divisions between the assumed outside and inside, the within and without.