I’m working with the underlying systems and structures at play in the world around us and within me through my practice. I’m particularly interested in those structures which are obscured and unseen, as I can come to better understand my relationship to them by creating related physical representations that might act in ways similar to the outside schemes. Through these models, I might be able to better understand the forces at work around and within me. These systems can include political and cultural systems or structures of my mind. Both can maintain oppression and allow liberation, but they always hold power over me, more so the less I recognize them. I acknowledge the likely vast distance between the models I create and the reality of an actual structure, but I maintain that by creating the model, however incomplete, I am changing that actual structure. This is more easily understood with aspects of the subconscious, but I believe it is true even with political systems.
The ways I personally and we collectively cope with uncertainty and absurdity through the creation of systems plays a particularly central role in the forms I create physically in my work. I work sculpturally, combining materials with languages of articulation (maps, architectural models, symbols, myths, traditions) to build relationships that explore the process of meaning making from raw data. The connection between rigidity and fragility, whether in a declaration of Truth or within a material form, is a principal examination within these considerations. Working with structures, both tangible and conceptual, allows for properties such as brittleness, flexibility, weight, tension, balance, etcetera to operate both physically and metaphorically. Through these elements, I can reflect on the relationship between my meaning-making process and the systems managing my freedoms, both politically and cognitively.