Mixed Messages: Artist Statement
Words are elastic: loaded yet hollow. Communicating is slippery. Epistemology is fragile, brittle and tangled – yet rhythmic. Language is a betrayal and a lifeline. Clay can be all of these. My sculpture explores the concurrent ephemerality and gravity of text and the modes of communication that structure our realities. We are in a time when information itself has become political – and this is confusing. I employ unconventional uses of ceramic material combined with inherently traditional approaches in hopes of reaching a level below – or beyond – language.
Starting with loaded homonyms such as Mean, Present, or Post – or ambiguities like Negative Space – I identify, write, embody and expand phrases that resonate on both personal and socio-political levels. The oldest work in this show, Truthology, was born in 2017, when the U.S. underwent a seismic shift. These clay drawings, vessels and assemblages function like the mouth-to-ear telephone game in which messages are warped, broken and reconfigured. – never reaching a destination intact. I utilize meticulous, repetitive methods like coiling or slip-trailing by hand (not 3d printing) to construct them, often integrating shards from older broken pieces into the structures. Words are traced and retraced, reverberating in space, or their outlined shapes become built vessels. Evoking topography, the process is a slow, complicated scenic route. I try make the virtual visceral, as I wrestle with what puzzles me. In our ever-shifting and overwhelming psychological and physical landscape, my practice seeks the small revelations of bringing together new and old, sense and nonsense, destruction and play.
The FearShare 2.0 wall installation reprises and reconfigures a project initiated in early 2024 in which crowd-sourced fears were written in porcelain to honor them, and anchored by a sculpted word that suggests an alternative. My new multimedia wall piece Mixed Messages reflects the chaos, violence and absurdity in which we find ourselves at this moment.
This exhibit was made possible by grants from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, the University of Hartford, Hartford Art School and Hartford Art School Endowment, Inc.
