Artist Statement

I am an observer and a maker. My work is a reflection of the world as I perceive it and therefore takes on a narrative quality. I have always been most articulate visually, and the physical process of making facilitates the examination of my initial observations as a kind of therapeutic research method. Working in contemporary craft, primarily metals and jewelry, carries a tangible, familiar quality that allows me to speak intimately about the human experience.

After a year living abroad from 2008 to 2009, I returned home to view my upbringing in the American suburbs through an entirely new lens; I had gained a comprehension and criticism of the world from which I came that I had never experienced before. I began to see the structures of suburbia not just as passive bystanders to our lives but as active propaganda regulating our thoughts, principles and actions. The resulting work, created from 2010 to 2014, addresses the conformity and constriction of the American suburbs. The body becomes the site for recontextualization and reconstruction of the forms and structures of suburbia; they are a part of our subconscious, a pervasive and fundamental framework through which we interpret the world and live inside of it. This body of work calls the viewer to reevaluate these familiar and seemingly innocuous forms – they transform to become cultish, parasitic, restrictive, and burdensome. I seek to reveal the quiet mantra of American housing pulsing over our landscape as a calculated enforcement of the preordained values of self-sufficiency, homogeneity, private enterprise, and the single family unit. Our homes become containers for our humanness under the inconspicuous guise of choice, individuality, and democratic freedom.