Everything I love becomes a body.

If I cannot give it words, I will give it a name.

My work most often begins with questions of how words, materials, and structures inform—or construct-- ways of seeing and being. I characterize my art practice as communing with the formal, an act of staring-thinking-making-moving that vibrates my intuitive sensors. This practice manifests in textual, multimedia works on paper and objects. Of late, my work is informed by a long-standing love of manuals—instructional texts of how-to, identification books, and informational pamphlets. Employing words and syntax to communicate supposed objective information, manuals are commentary, poetry, structurally embedded points of view, and belief systems. The manual orders our environment and because we make the world in our image (with grave problematics, lop-sided plans, and sometimes with earnest Star Trek optimism of making the world equitable and loving) its taxonomies reveal metaphors for living.

My heart's as open
as a sheet cake
Tooth and tongue
Fork

That you are reading a wildflower guidebook.

What's to come.

Many monuments to a small fierce feeling.

My current body of work Memorandums aims at dissolving, constructing, and reordering words as a means to comment on and build space for equity, compassion, and complexity. Words frame experience, construct place, and in their fallible, responsive, and contextual character create rifts in meaning. The history of the women’s suffrage movement, issues of gender identities, and the ways language has been wielded in regards to these topics foregrounds the work, in which I aim to create a fuzzy ground that not only complicates the self and community but also the art object itself, hovering between image and poetry. Each piece is written and built simultaneously— the material form looking for the content and vice versa— and intervenes on the physical space sometimes subtly and at times loudly. The work spans several mediums (charcoal, screen-printing, fabric, pencil shavings, glitter) all of which have particular material ties to activism, gender stereotypes, and the act of writing. The act of reading and looking asks viewers to inhabit an alternate language thusly affecting their inner spaces and creating a perceptual shift that alters their surroundings. I explore all facets of language— from its semantic properties to its materiality— to make, in shorthand, writing slightly off the page.

labor driven touch

Perhaps – ing a – long

Of late, it’s about language built for equity, the optimism of Star Trek (all iterations, the entire franchise), friendship, flakes + dust, momentary coalescences, chances, chances, acknowledgement of the inevitability of massive faults in understanding. It’s happening! It’s happening! The way things fall, uncertain possibility, (maybe?) by haps, per haps, hap, hap-py.

Porous, please.

All blues
All yeses
No pants!
No pants!

The Women The Women

Language is my primary medium. Words frame experience, construct place, and in their fallible, responsive, and contextual character create rifts in meaning. I use the lexicons of love and desire, of architecture, of historical narratives, to intervene upon a physical space, and affect the inner space of the reader, creating a perceptual shift that alters her surroundings. I explore all facets of language—from its semantic properties to its materiality--to make, in shorthand, writing slightly off the page.

I am moved; I am moving.

Reordering within the limits and slips of language.

Reordering experience within the limits and slips of language.

A weak image: responsive and contextual, lacking a definitive cohesive encapsulation, human, a collection of gestures, utterances, slips

With a voice shimmering
“I know
I’m making
the mistakes. I’m making them.”
I know how many insults*
of my own making
I can inflict in a year.

*Donavon Davidson

mangy disquietude

I felt around and found the grain open to split.

This work

form.

A
A division

by
by arrangement


All the
portions in
any

Popular to Contrary Belief

they didn’t wear pants
we still don’t know why

Probably I did
misread the signals
or rather
transgressed
the agreed upon

Suppose I told you it is about love. Suppose I told you it is about rearranging, loosening words from what they point to, letting them push up against a complaint, a dominant narrative, the shape of things, in pursuit of a soft underbelly.

This is painful and fun at the same time.

I want you in High Fidelity.

Pointing words at things.

See you soon or not
one of those

A piece of paper. Several, piles.
Hairs on forearms of two people.
A cavernous place, a luminous place.
Several built structures. Timber, brick.

My one-track is elaborate.

Taking things away
a kind of gathering

Suppose I told you
it is about love

My work begins most often as a witness to intimacy, my own, among strangers, in place and objects, and the decision to examine it in language. The body is central to my work as a site in which the symbolic and intangibility of language materialize through utterance (the viewer reading the work,) inner drifting and synchronicities (the voice and content of the work.) In my recent concrete poetry I am attracted to the sincere gravity and exaggerated sentimentality of emotional transition, such as heartbreak, loss, and desire and use poetic language to complicate this precarious relationship. In love and romance linguistic clichés tend to render earnest experience sentimental and saccharine. I collect and manipulate these clichés in order to locate an earnest emotional knowledge replete with complexities, struggles, and humor.

My work rearranges language to create poetic spaces and alternative narratives. I use a combination of drawing, printmaking, sound, and installation to push poetics from the page into spatial and physical environments.

Language assigns meaning. Words point to things in the world, both literal and abstract. In combinations they can produce content, narrative, and imagery. Yet, the presumed efficiency of language as a producer of meaning masks its other, more material characteristics. In addition to their semantic functionality, letters and words are things in their own right, with independent sonic, visual, and material identities. My work seeks to explore the borderlands between the twin realms occupied by language—the semantic and the material.

It is in the tension between the semantic and the material, content and form, where I find a strong resonance to explore ideas of longing and intimacy. Language and experience influence each other. Verbal clichés inform how we think about such overwrought emotions and the profundity of longing, loss, and romance can expose the cliché’s ability to squash complexity.

I embrace the clichés of longing and reinterpret them using language’s imprecision: verbal misunderstandings, multiple meanings of a single word, shifts in context. An established device in poetry, the fickle nature of words allows their rearrangement, loosening them from their meanings, which provides a space for different perspectives.