Advanced Fiber Studio (Highlights)
Informed by my previous career in apparel production, I create environments that function outside the commodity driven marketplace as a container for the contemplation of everyday decisions and cultural norms. Drawing parallels from craft, the new art economy, and mass-production, I explore the relationships and disconnections between maker, machine, and consumer.
In the past, I cast hollow garbage receptacles from handmade paper to critique complacency toward disposability. Transforming strong, reliable collectors of detritus and material burdens into fragile, vulnerable forms was a meditation on the impact of frequent wastefulness. I feel wastefulness is a result from unawareness to consequences. Exploring the Marxist notion that industrialization has caused these separations with in society, I have also used sewing machines to perform restrictive, destructive, and futile labors.
Although asserting a politicized agenda, my work gently implicates the viewer. Through performative events, interactive installations and material-sensitive objects, the aestheticized temporality provokes investigation, self-reflection, and, ideally, action. Currently, I am pursuing participatory projects to disseminate the empowerment found through making. I am interested in the possibility that expanded poetic agency could aid in a heightened attention to social responsibility.