My interest in history, memory, emotions, family, mortality and fragility have played into my artwork since I was a child. The idea of loss—loss of a person, object or sentimentality—is painful and fascinating. I live for the moments of hyperawareness and for the memories that they create. My own memories plague me, haunt me, elate and invigorate me.
Memories come back to me in cycles and like an old friend, I am able to gather something new from them each time. My interest in the human memory and in the essence of a person is a concept that I relate directly to my grandfather. It is through those vivid memories of Saturday mornings doing yard work, of church on Easter, of chowder in red china on Christmas Eve, of all the times I stopped on my way to school just so he didn’t eat breakfast alone, of the swing he built for me and the many visits to it even after his death that I have come to understand the values and habits that he imparted upon me at a young age.
Since then, I have begun to understand the role that lineage and my personal history have played in my development as an artist and individual. I believe strongly in Wallace Stegner’s notion that if you do not know where you are, than you do not know who you are. Where you are does not always refer to a physical place, in fact, above all, I believe that where I am refers directly to my place in history, within a bloodline, a family unit, a generation, a culture. Where I am is defined not only by who I physically am but also by the values, ethics and adherence to or rejection of ideologies.
I am constantly remembering, analyzing and mapping events of the past in my head. These documents, in bits and pieces, mapped in their tangled, twisted, timelessness have become the crux of my creative ventures. I understand that memory augments, alters, simplifies, complicates, and reinvents. I revel in these possibilities.
The need for fragility in my work is, in part, my way of addressing the idea of permanence and persistence within the material. In a material that could withstand hundreds of thousands of years of wear and tear, I strive to make pieces that convey the temporal, the fleeting, the eidetic. My intent is not to appropriate but to re present the images of my grandparents as I have come to understand and cherish them. My memories, as fleeting and augmented as they may be, are my most prized possessions.
