artist statement, june 2025

Like all offspring of colonizing and imperial histories, I – we – have to relearn how to conjugate worlds with partial connections and not universals and particulars --Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble

My earliest memories nestle in and around a small wooden and tarpaper Geodesic dome my parents built in the woods of Southern Illinois. I remember climbing out of my crib before the sun came up to play in the leaves of the velvet damp forest floor, scaling monumental tree roots in the creeks, and falling asleep gazing at branches filtering  stars through huge (leaky) hexagonal windows. That period in the early 1970s, when my parents and their friends were inspired by visionary architect, Buckminster Fuller, and the Back to the Land movement to create their own small commune, didn’t last long. My memories have the gauzy, golden feeling of a story worn thin from retelling.

I believe the memories persist because they were from an earlier world, where anything was possible if I just went outside. Outside was not constrained by the limits of school, church, or family I would soon learn about. Outside was endlessly creative, a limitless multiverse in the woods, where learning was exciting, usually collaborative, and as easy or hard as telling a good story.

As an interdisciplinary artist, I ‘conjugate worlds’ somewhere between the remembered and the imagined. In my interactive installations I layered new and traditional media, striving to map the intersections between complex systems like human and animal kinship systems or settler colonialism and the natural environment. I am inspired by my lived experience parenting three neurodiverse children, two of them queer, and teaching in the same kinds of lower socioeconomic communities I grew up in to investigate stories that are often overlooked. In my fieldwork practice, I collect evidence—videos, photographs, and sketches—from the borderlands between human and non-human animals that I edit and layer, examining the variations and similarities between how we, as individual animals--human and otherwise--experience the passing of time, memory, and the natural world. Mark making and poetry provide the armature of my installations and socially engaged practice allows me to invite communities, both human and non-human into dialogue, illuminating stitch by stitch, frame by frame, one small square of the colossal quilt our kinship and shared obligations to each other have woven over time.   

My influences are more than I can list here, but include Tacita Dean’s sublime analog films, Mark Dion’s inquiry into how the 'scientific' arrangement of objects communicates an often hidden power system, and Donna Haraway’s post humanist analysis of our shared ontology with other animals and our place in the natural environment. I look to William Kentridge for his animated narratives that grapple with almost unfathomable injustice, Anselm Kiefer’s monumental works of materiality in response to the ethical and affective impossibility of facing genocide, Jacob Lawrence’s blend of intimate and monument in often autobiographical story paintings, and Sally Mann for how she illuminates the beauty and terror of motherhood, especially in a hot climate. Finally, I find inspiration in Kiki Smith’s feminist mythos and lyrical interdisciplinary work.