ARTIST STATEMENT

Braiding forms and imagery from agriculture, mythology, and medicine, my work considers systems of sustenance and healing and the cultural and ecological legacies of land cultivation. Grounded in the landscape of the southeastern United States— a site of fantasy, precarity, and symbolic abundance—the work presents chimeric objects in which allegories of sustenance, danger, and purification merge. Working primarily between ceramics and metal, materials bound with associations of strength and fragility, a material interplay mirrors the themes of danger and resilience within the work. 

In a literal and poetic sense, vessels function as mediators in the interactions that they might symbolize or facilitate. The sculptural vessel forms I make are hand-built and adorned with relief carvings and cast details of vernacular objects such as deer hooves, peach pits, puzzle pieces, electric fencing insulators, tools, and toys. Animals are often rendered in ambiguous states of metamorphosis, hunt, or performance. The work’s layered surfaces are built through multiple firings and often incorporate metal components. In two-dimensional works, the carved porcelain imagery is mounted on metal. Employing jeweler’s techniques on a large scale, these works resemble engraved charms. Referencing objects of protection and historical depictions of infernal and sublime landscapes, they imagine possibilities of connection between wild and domestic realms, between chaos and play, and hybridity as an emblem of resiliency.