I am curious about and want to explore the odd feelings recollection conjures up in individuals. When our memory meets the present moment, the resulting feelings are often nuanced, complex and hard to pin down. The sweetness and pleasure felt in recalling certain objects and events often intermingles with feelings of sadness, loss and regret. It is that territory that I tend to gravitate to, the difficult to explain, strangely felt past.
I work with nostalgic and popular images- popsicles, notebook paper, dolls and toys in an (often subconscious) effort to refer to the collective past that exists as a part of all of us. I don’t mean to infer that we long for that past, but rather, I want to acknowledge and investigate the role that the past has played in who we have become- as individuals and as a society. I see my work as a means to reflect on that bygone place. Simple, vernacular, understandable images conjure up the mystery of our collective past.
I think of my work as asking questions of what is now gone or slowly going- what is latent there? What loss? What longing? What joyful thing? What do we miss? Can we get it back? Do we want to?
Notebook paper, in the digital age is obsolete. It is a remnant of another time. (A piece of notebook paper feels as obsolete as clay in this day and age.) I think that is a funny and also a sad thing to make out of clay, notebook paper. It is kind of pathetic and beautiful at the same time. It is an exaggerated statement about the digital age, I suppose. It is my small monument to the loss of the hand and the physical world. My work can seem like an elegy to the knowledge of the hand, and to memory.