The Statement
Through the creation of my art I desire to bring attention to the ways that people address change. Whether it’s done with acceptance, denial, or refusal, change has the habit of inciting intense reactions that affect ones relationships with their environment, their peers, and themselves, sometimes evoking an additional change. By representing peoples’ reactions to change: resistance, forfeit, evolution, growth, there is something that any audience member could identify with. Perhaps they themselves haven’t personally experienced that emotion or change, but they’ve had someone close them experience it, seen it in that loved one’s face, and been affected by it. I want to express these things in my work because I feel that we, as human beings, get so caught up in seeing our journey as just “us,” a solo experience, rather than something that, while retaining individuality, can still overlap the experience of another.
We have such pride in our feelings being “ours,” yet often when it’s negative, a weakness or pain, we’d rather hide or disguise it and not claim it as what we’ve felt. A common motif in all of my work is the hand or something that represents or relates to the hand. Hands are a focal point in my work because they are not good secret keepers: They splay and fidget, gesture and beckon at what the soul is really after, often before the consciousness knows what’s going on. I feel that ceramics is the perfect medium to translate this concept because the clay is so responsive to the force of a finger and is eager to retain the imprint of the one molding it.
I have had the privilege of working with various nonprofit organizations for over half a decade. My work included disaster relief, chemical dependency, women’s safe houses, refugee centers, and youth development programs. Working in service has left impressions upon me of hardship, perseverance, acceptance, and endless strength because the people that I’ve had the privilege to work with have overcome so much. They’ve experienced every raw grain of emotion that comes with those hard changes and still persevered. Losing a home, a family member, a way to provide for their children, even their freedom; and here they are, forever changed but still standing. As an artist I ask myself “How can I allow myself to hide from those emotions and ideas when I’ve seen them be exposed on the strongest people I’ve ever met?” To hide the truth in what monumental change yields on a person’s visage would be a great dishonor to the people who have impacted my life the most.
