My work is an investigation into the forms, states and situations that are a result of the complex – and often tenuous – relationship between humans and the natural world. I am specifically drawn to those relationships which exhibit a mutual, and perpetuating, dependency; interactions which display a fluidity between the roles of the dominant and submissive elements. My most recent pieces have stemmed from an interest in modern agriculture as such a symbiotic relationship; a system in which we are as dependent upon the crops we have domesticated as they are upon us. I am fascinated by organisms – such as houseplants or beans – which invisibly inhabit our daily lives as the most basic embodiment of human/Nature relationship. They are provocative in their apparent simplicity, iconic of our concept of “Nature”, yet entirely byproducts of human desire. In this sense, I strive to use biological forms within my work as simultaneously natural and manufactured, virile and sterile, dominant and submissive, exotic and ordinary.

My exploration of this synthesis of nature and culture is conceptually reinforced in each piece through the layered interplay of material, process and form. The materials I work with can be superficially classified into two categories: the “industrial/manmade” and the “natural”. I work to combine these materials in such a way that their juxtaposition does not emphasize their polarity, but rather subverts the initial classifications of “artificial” and “natural”. When employing manufactured materials in my work – such as plastic, rubber, polyurethane or microcrystalline wax – I use them as formally organic components, intentionally displaying the natural variability and individualized care that can be achieved from their application. Conversely, the “natural” materials I incorporate into a piece – such as beans, flour and corn – are there not necessarily to emphasize their “naturalness”, but to underscore the fact that they too are mass-manufactured parts of the work. The forms I therefore choose to work with are highly developed hybrids of natural and industrial processes. So too, the processes I utilize to create a piece are intended to intertwine mechanized production and individualization, mimicking industrial fabrication and natural reproductive variation.

Whether working with the common bean or the exotica that fascinated 19th century natural historians, my work is intended to examine the social perception of human/Nature interdependence. The pieces I create are a marriage of human idealization and natural structure, the amalgamation of an idea and the form it is derived from. I neither wish to assign positive nor negative values to human society or to Nature. I rather hope to emphasize the strange beauty produced from the union of the “natural” and the “artificial”; a union which ranges from nurturing, to sexual, to antagonistic, and everything in-between.

Artist Statement (2009)