Installations
Artist Statement
Once, I was in a small boat drifting towards a commercial dock at low tide; underneath I saw a mass of gold pieces glittering in the half light. I was momentarily convinced I had arrived at some Down East El Dorado. Moving closer I recognized hundreds of used scratch lottery tickets, clustered and discarded in the mud.
Now, consider how the feel of a neighborhood can change suddenly and radically by music blasting from a passing car. This incongruity imposed on a known landscape has a jarring effect on one’s sense of time and place that leads to unpredictable associations and improbable points of reference. I intend for my installations to have the effect of an unusual story overheard in a public place, one that changes your relationship to a physical place by becoming another layer of its history.
Light consistently alters the way we perceive our surroundings, prompting memories and provoking the imagination to see or experience a place differently. Familiar landscapes are replaced, even temporarily, by fantastical spaces, through simple shifts of light. It is this phenomenon, and my intense curiosity about the subjective nature of visual perception, that informs my work.
My drawings and installations are driven by personal or historical narrative and are rooted in literature and poetry. I create theatrical spaces, shadow theaters animated by flashlights and turn tables and viewed through vellum scrims. My drawings and paper cuts strive to do the same; I adapt the structures and characters of classic narratives, such as fairytales, to create alternate worlds, spaces that become like snapshots from a collective unconscious. I aim to straddle worlds by marrying the familiar with the strange, offering up landscapes that mirror the unpredictably shifting environments in which we live but only partly comprehend.
Each piece is a stage set, waiting for the viewer to attend the play. The gestures of a working harbor with its entrances and exits, or lost cargo on the oceans floor with its ancient relics alongside modern goods, initiate the action. A memorial passageway is filled with echoes of the recently deceased: a banjo picking an old jazz standard, a voice archived on an answering machine, glimpses of an irreversible past.
My children’s stories are populated by characters that move through the world seeking agency, grappling with identity. A recently mined lump of iron ore weighs the options of becoming steel; a collection of ancient creatures defy time, and categorization, until the modern world intrudes on their ‘senior living community’; in the world of 1970s Boston an eleven-year-old girl finds her power through kung fu and banjo.
How we see the world, how we understand our history, is malleable. My work aims to explore this malleability as a reminder that nothing is really fixed. People and landscapes continually shift and change, along with historical record.