ARTIST STATEMENT

Taking an autobiographical and sociological approach to making, manual labor and connection to material hold prominent positions in a studio practice intent on cultivating authenticity. Through analysis of personal experiences with domesticity, place, and belonging within micro and macro societal structures, the agency to craft my own future emerges from a work ethic once enlisted to compensate for shame and seek acceptance. The centrality of manual labor has become inescapable, but its employment now hinges on terms that are self-designated. Memories and experiences merge with trajectories of optimism to become markers of reclamation on an unyielding mission to locate a blueprint for my site.

Queer theory and American consumer culture inform the materialization of identity. Communicating the identity of the maker through their objecthood, the forms become extensions of self. Disrupting norms associated with the ceramic medium, in its characterization the work rejects traditional presentation and positions the viewer in a space between the known and unknown; the familiar and the unfamiliar. It transcends time and space —not always existing in realty but acknowledging it. Drawing upon past, present and future iconography, it is in this in-between space that my truth is defined. And in the process of uncovering this truth, the objects are molded into devices of queer futuring.

A form of futuring that relies on relentless optimism -as both a means for survival and a tactic for rejecting victimhood- the primary concerns of queer futuring are reclaiming the past and laying claim to the future. It suggests a shift from a past spent compensating for shame to a future focused on cultivating authenticity. In the process moments of respite can be found in the in-between and through the intuitive labor of reclamation, the maker is reviled to himself.