Statement:

In the northeast corner of Kansas on 300 acres, you’ll find my family's small midwestern farm. No houses can be seen from my house and the night is so dark and very quiet. The land is my friend, a companion I know like the back of my hand. 

Labor is not shy on the farm, the land raised me with a drive toward trusting my instinct. With this imperative nature, I create to digest an object's value, to reveal how it can be read with or without knowledge of its conception. These works take form in unconventional ceramic frames, exaggerated human-like figures, pieces, images, fantasies, dreams and theatrical scenes that reference reality and memory through a foggy and shifting perception.

I strive to avoid predictability in decision making, I’ve learned it can turn toward rigid explanation and over-evolved clarity. These result in an internal sterile landscape that withers the appreciation for impermanence, imperfection and even abnormality in my process, which are things I hold on to tightly. 

I believe that when I choose my materials, they also choose me. This connection is an ever evolving relationship of active communication. Having the opportunity to work with these materials is an honor that I take seriously that has everything to do with how I approach a material, the way that I handle the material and talk about the material. 

Exaggeration in my figures presents through twisted necks, extension in body parts and fantastical creatures. The environment surrounding my farm land rarely gifted me comfortable seclusion. Instead, it enforced a constant rigid expectation for labor, these requests had no space for consent nor did they ask for forgiveness. Thus, these creatures do the same; they are the result of submission to demands in the place I call home.

The frames and their objects encapsulate emotional maturity gained as I understand what I know to be true. Clay maneuvered and pinched to look cow bone-like, encloses ordinary yet sacred objects. 

Perpetually I’m reminded that the wholeness of someone's being is inseparable from their art. In my absence, my essence will remain embedded in the clay as a record of instinct, adaptation and survival.