In the beginning, I ask the things around me what they want to be. Often there is no clear answer, but on rare occasions, my Papaw’s tattered apron screeches through the stillness and asks to become a quilt. Seeing a length of spare rope, the old tire in the backyard begs to be a swing. Sometimes the sofa just wants to be turned upside-down.
As an artist, I am a medium. Not a medium who communicates with the dead, but a medium by which matter reorganizes itself.
I could call myself a painter and say that I use paint to make paintings, but really the paint uses me. At the very least, we rely on each other.
I have never felt separate from the material world. Rather, I am part of it, slowly drowning in the chaos of our collective hoard—a jumble of things in flux. My work keeps me afloat. I embrace decay and brokenness, relishing the latency of everyday objects to become entirely new things.
Informed by my rural upbringing in Appalachia, my sculptures, paintings, and textile works are explorations of the poetic functions of objects and materials. They are snapshots of the moment a thing ceases to be what we expect. I embed personal memories, family histories, and country landscapes within unassuming forms, allowing the fleshiness of my objects and their psychic weights to come into foreground—to become sticky.