Artist Statement

I understand place as the silt of a riverbed—the slow sedimentation of memory caked in labor, decay, maintenance, loss. I am informed by the dwindling stars visible in my night sky, the ever-growing swarms of absent fireflies, and the fear that one day I will realize I have forgotten the crush of a thousand cicadas droning at twilight. Entropy erodes, but its losses accumulate. Absence becomes something carried, its shape known by the tenderness of the cavity it leaves behind. My work attempts to actualize this accumulation—to give material presence to what is no longer there.

I have come to understand loss as a creative force. Through sculpture and installation, I distort familiar forms of domestic construction, rural labor, architecture, and the natural world to contour to the cavities carved by grief. I cast these impressions of absence in salt, bronze, clay, and salvage, allowing the materials to carry the histories already written within them. I set these materials against drywall, dimensional lumber, house paint, and other languages of contemporary construction—materials bound to domesticity, security, and our attempts to impose order.

I embrace the tension between attempted preservation and its eventual erosion. Making exists as an act of care within that contradiction—not resistance to entropy, but recognition that what disappears doesn’t simply leave us; it becomes part of what we get to lose next.