Statement

I am an interdisciplinary artist who combines traditional fiber processes, found materials, animation, light, and video to create multi-dimensional installations and paintings.

My work is an extended meditation on the intersection of impermanence and regeneration. I combine found and newly made materials to create fragile, transient structures that echo the fragility of our material systems. Salvaged residues from the urban environment are transmuted and given new lives in my studio. A broken light grid, once used to diffuse and scatter light in an office complex becomes a light and color machine. Weathered fishing ropes from a junkyard in Maine lend their history and resonance to my sculptural weavings. Wildflowers collected in empty lots throughout the city become vibrant natural dyes. I reuse materials over and over, further connecting the work to the ethics of recycling and regeneration. Each project builds on the last, often deconstructing and reconstructing elements of previous installations to respond to the architecture and context of each site.

My most recent body of work, Chameleon Blind Window Project, is a series of multi-dimensional “light paintings” installed in vacant storefronts. Designed to be visible 24 hours a day, the installations transform each night as dusk falls spilling light and color into the street and lives of passing pedestrians. Instead of brown-papered, empty storefronts with a “for rent” signs in the windows, this project gives life to empty spaces, improves walkability by providing light and disrupts the stigma of vacant spaces while buildings are in transition. While seeking out diverse neighborhoods and sites for the work, I have encountered powerful social intersections of contemporary art and community that have become the grounding inspiration for my artistic practice. I aim to create visual experiences that will act as interventions—engaging the inhabitants of these urban environments, and transforming their daily experience in ways both subtle and obvious—and through that transformative experience planting the seeds of a changed relationship to their street, their neighborhoods and their communities. My hope is that through collaborations with local stakeholders and influencers—chambers of commerce, community groups, government entities, store owners—new possibilities for community regeneration will emerge, as will new motivation to expand on the transformative power of a moment of joy and color on a dark street.