Artist Statement

 

My work engages the idea that our relationship to the past and our own personal histories is more fluid and impermanent than we are led to believe. I believe memory is not a system of retrieval but an adaptive, constructive process, where recollection produces not a likeness, but a version of a past experience linked more to circumstances in the present. Memory then becomes an eternal re-thinking and re-evaluation, continually being rewritten by current perceptions. It illuminates as much about our present desires as it does the past as a form of truth. Because memory is an ever-shifting confluence of past and present, my work relies on the fragile and fragmented. Using the language of delicacy and walking the line between ephemeral and permanent, I create works that explore the creative act of remembering and suggest that searching doesn’t always lead to finding.

 

I am interested in the interplay between object and image, and blurring the perceptions of both. While an image creates an opposition between the “real” experience of the past and the “new” experience of the present, objects work to bridge this rupture through the idea of containment and presentation.[1] My work relies on this rupture and reconciliation, on the image representing and the object presenting. My objects and images begin to flux, emerge and dissolve within each other to create hidden trails of the common and unlikely, the real and imagined. Additionally, the ceramic object’s history is embedded in the idea of containing, holding, and preserving, and as such, it is a fitting material to reference the desire for preserving experience. These works represent moments, yet through the constructed and allusive use of ceramic objects, they begin to tangibly present the act of searching and attempt to preserve.

 

 Porcelain’s exceptional range of qualities is a way for me to symbolically reference much of what I find compelling about memory as a process. For centuries, it has been a material that embodies desire and value, yet still remains tethered to the temporal. From its appearance as a status symbol of wealth in Dutch still life painting, to its more humble, everyday presence around our own dining tables, it is at once both precious and common. I engage its dialectical properties as a material liquid and solid, soft and immutable, fragile and strong. It is by emphasizing these qualities that I am able to underscore the shifting perceptions found within remembering and perceiving. I drip, coat, cast, render, shatter and reconstruct the porcelain. By combining these various states of matter and wholeness, I am able to entangle the timeline of memory to further reinforce the idea that memory is the present past.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Paul Matheiu, “Object Theory,” Utopic Impulses: Contemporary Ceramics Practice, ed. Ruth Chambers, Amy Gogarty, and Mirielle Perron, Rosdale Press: Vancouver, Canada, 2008.