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The materials that I work with participate in a circular economy, affecting how the artworks change as they are passed on to future generations. Parts migrate from disassembled wholes and exist within new and surprising contexts through reuse. As a fourth-generation jeweler, I have cultivated a deep appreciation for how traditional materials are embedded with intrinsic and acquired values. However, it is the contradictory quality of heirlooms that I now explore through sculpture-installation. Trading metal for plastic, a ubiquitous symbol that celebrates our worship of the present and disregard for the future, I make artworks for an eco-conscious world. They point to how the accumulation of objects and our attachments to their narratives can be transformed through sculptures that allow us to build new associations.
I fuse my passion for making with environmental and social concerns. Early on in my career, after earning a degree in geology, I joined Ethical Metalsmiths to create a platform for change. This work shifted my artistic focus and challenged me to incorporate environmental values into material choices and conceptual motivations. Traditionally trained, my approach to making means honoring techniques regardless of the materials I work with. Common waste, such as plastic, is easily dismissed and seen as repugnant. This is too simplified, however, and I look for resourcefulness and reconciliation through hours spent working with these environmental adversaries. I see myself as both an advocate for and against the items we conveniently throw in our recycle bins. While plastics are vilified, they have useful properties not yet replaceable.
I amplify the complicated relationship between disposable objects and landscape. These geographies of critique celebrate labor, optimism, and humor and use scale to immerse the viewer in the urgency of our times. I tease out beauty and from a distance, the sculptures draw in the viewer through their familiar forms. However, up close their dual nature unfolds, and the indelible marks of usage highlight our collective complacency. This is true of Emoji Series, 2020-present, where the exaggerated digital symbols are rendered from thousands of strips of plastic bags. The crying emoji, broken heart and ‘NO’ sign evoke landscape. In fact, they become a continuation of landscape, as the ubiquity of their material DNA has endless reach.
Spending countless hours in the studio creating with an environmental enemy is a rumination on peacemaking with a significant adversary that is toxic to our biological and biospheric health. It is also a reflection on the complex balancing act between materiality and artistic expression. The work harnesses solastalgia, or eco-anxiety, to challenge cultural practices that cause environmental devastation while also celebrating the meaningful narratives behind our relationship to things. Ultimately, I am beseeching a closer look, a chance to reinvent ideas around our throwaway culture through a long-term investment in materials; an investment that allows them to evolve.