Artist Statement

Memories of my Catholic childhood have had a significant impact on my life and work, and the religion formed the structure of my daily existence.  My father played the organ at Mass every week, I attended years of Catholic school, my devout grandmother lived with us and reigned over our family with her rigid notion of right and wrong. The source material with which I surround myself has its roots in my religious upbringing, and comes from the margins of medieval illuminated manuscripts, depictions of monstrous races, and strange renderings of biblical scenes. The images are chaotic yet still: they are visually compressed as if they might explode at any moment, and often narratives in their entirety are depicted scene-by-scene on the same picture plane. The passage of time is revealed in the present tense, making the narrative obvious but unsettling. I am interested in the corruptibility of flesh, the deformity of body, the unpredictability of nature, and the inevitability of death.

I use plaster molds to make my work and many of the molds I use are stock characters from the Christian nativity.  They reference my interest in Catholic imagery, but the content implicit in their form is not that simple. They are kitsch objects; they are ubiquitous commercial molds, available to be reproduced again and again. They are easy to find, and easy to cast, and many other molds exist at the same scale. Their permutability is tied to the process and subsequently to the content of my work.

These objects live in a complicated space. They are emotionally loaded sculptures full of pathos and palpable intensity, but they are also tied to the world of ubiquitous collectible porcelain. At first glance they are the innocuous occupants of the shelf or the mantle, but upon closer inspection their subversive reality is exposed. Heads are duplicated and pushed together, limbs are amputated or obscured, and faces are masked and perforated.  Human and animal forms are combined to create grotesque hybrid beings. All of these elements collide to create a strange world outside the boundaries of the everyday.

 My work investigates peculiar things that live on the edge of normal, incongruous things with a messy sacred hierarchy that exist side by side but yet not quite together, things that make us wonder and compel us to look again.