2024

Monterey Cypress

51 1/2 h x 55 1/2 w x 5 1/2 d inches

The piece came about as a contemplation of emotion felt as weight, like gravity on the body. How there are invisible forces that push and pull inside and out. In the work, links and shifts create a rippling cause and effect. I like to think of it as a fragment of space and time we’ve zoomed into or even an expression of something that’s happening inside ourselves. it’s a fabric like series of connected events. An inclination can be our tendency, something that causes us to bend in a way, or a leaning into. Inclination is also a physical description, a measurement of slope or tilt. For example, the earth in inclined on its axis which in turn causes night and day, seasons and weather as it relates to the sun and moon.

2024

Red Oak

27 1/2 h x 27 1/2 w x 8 d inches

A force appears to draw a lattice out of shape, through a plane that mirrors its twin in reverse. In both black and white, and moving in two directions, it’s as if the piece deforms towards itself.

In Pulled the meticulously crafted white oak lines stretch around an invisible weight with grain appearing to weave in and out across the grid, all which sit framed evenly across its black mirror base.

Through layering of feelings and fascination with material and process my work explores states of being and curiosities.

A piece by piece accumulation through repetition in process where salvaged bits of wood, remnants of projects past, are each treated with faceted edges like crystals and consolidated into a wood rock formation. This new nature is formed through routine scavenging from my own studio’s waste resource where material doesn’t disappear but is reshaped into a new tale. I’m partially motivated by interest in a rock collection I inherited from my father, and in thinking about why he was particularly fascinated with these formations I’ve come to find my own appreciation. Rocks are markers of time, through what they reveal about how they are made, when, and from what. These mundane objects can even be billions of years old.

Included in The Shape of Time, a solo-exhibition at Municipal Bonds, 2021.

Wood, various species (oak, fir, walnut, beech, maple, ash, birch, elm)

Charred white oak, oil finish
72 x 24 x 34 inches

Here preserved in time, the chair is at the epicenter and isolatingly charred. On one side layers of veneer are delaminating and curling like pages of a book. The burning represents a painful yet transformative moment as fires though destructive can also be life giving.

This sculptural set of shelves is designed as a sequence of collapsing surface layers, each one weakening or dragging the layer above downward. Hinting at a gradual collapse caught frozen in time, and suggesting both rigidity and fluidity, the curves in this piece are echoed in the end-grain wave pattern on the facing edge of each layer.

Paper, mylar
With artist-made oak frame
26 x 19 ¾ inches (framed)
A push and pull of destruction and creation where the punching and tearing through a plane of paper forms three unique portraits. Each textural images suggests igneous formation, aerial landscapes, or a map of the stars. The matte texture and reflective back layer create an changing experience as light and the viewer’s perspective adjust.

Cellulose II

Newsprint, wood glue

A second, more undulating iteration of a concept inspired by a growing pile of used double-stick tape, this piece emerged from process of hand rolling and gluing together paper tubes, their subtle tapers leading to a naturally undulating form suggesting the rings of a tree.

A simple and familiar vase form is captured in this series of objects which appear broken. The profile of a series of disintegrating rims recalls a landscape on the horizon, and the use of sand as a material suggests impermanence, reminding us of the inevitability of decay.

Like a conch shell calls the echo of an ocean, this rock like accumulation, sliced like a geode, laterally shifts exposing a murmuring interior.

Rocks can be keys to the past when direct communication is no longer possible. We are left to make sense from remnants.

My father collected many things and, as it turned out, he had a substantial collection of stones, minerals and rocks. While I never asked him about this fascination, I’ve wondered since he’s been gone. The physical weight of this world left behind required attention and a kind of mining of a man and his belongings. This piece contemplates a past then attempts to decipher and re-imagine an object as a hidden message.

Created for the exhibition Conversations in the Dark at Municipal Bonds in San Francisco.

This reconfigurable grouping of funnel forms emerges as an organism on the interior architecture of a space, almost blending into the wall. Quietly positioned like mouths and listening ears, these works are inspired by lichen’s ability to reveal the invisible as a bioindicator.

Port Orford cedar
23.5 x 19.5 x 32.75 inches

An armchair, a seat of power, infested and eroding and just at the brink before damage to its structural integrity.

This trio of coopered and splined pairings are abstractions of seedpods, tree trunks, and an overhead skylight. Their funnel-like forms are positioned to collect light from above, casting angled shadows which change throughout the course of the day and year.

Untitled (Cellulose 1)
2006
Newsprint, wood glue
33 x 33 x 3 inches
A concept inspired by a growing pile of used double-stick tape, this piece emerged from process of hand rolling and gluing together paper tubes, their subtle tapers leading to a naturally undulating form suggesting the rings of a tree.

I walked by an large hule tree several times a day and scooped up a fallen leaf or two in passing.  This instinctual gathering led to a daily collection of the tree's fallen leaves as I stitched them together with twigs.  Final installation in La Biblioteca Henestrosa, in Oaxaca, Mexico depicts a movement reminiscent of their path into my reach.