Initially, i work loosely, privately, in my studio. I bring in objects i have been fancying lately. I follow whims of materials and experiment with methods, comfortable with failure and unafraid. I am not worried about time, nor am i slave to a list. I follow a bliss, and i am happy, and peaceful. Eventually, while i am mostly thinking of something else, i fall in love with an image my brain has been slowly forming. and as it bubbles up to the surface, previously intuitive decisions make a new kind of sense and the experiments i have been doing seem to gain a trajectory. As the piece solidifies and begins to emerge, I start to feel anxiety about failure and become stringent in my expectations of the materials. I begin to notice how the idea i am in love with contains grief and sadness. The peacefulness and the grief are connected somehow, a mysterious antinomy, each a side of the same coin, and both are in the work in the end. I somehow feel the need to defend the notion of beauty, and i allow my work to hold a quiet and straightforward version. We know there are moments where beauty sparks from darkness, and we know it can be found in that which has previously been overlooked. We know it causes us to seek balance and breadth, as Andy Warhol in Sweden longs for an ugly face. So then could our sense of beauty be a tool? Perhaps a tool we use to evolve our cultural systems to make them serve us with less ecological cost? I believe allowing our sense of beauty to grow and stay flexible help keep us adaptable as a species. The human desire to observe and create beauty should be championed, and shared. The materials i choose to use in my work are found, abundant, humble, or culled from the throw away society that has sprung up around us, because of us. I tend to like materials made from earth– ceramics, plasters, glass and materials made from plants– paper, wood and well, plants. I tend to make work that is occupiable, or that has a very strong sense of entrance. My work sometimes requests that the viewer make themselves smaller or braver to enter. I create spaces occupiable by the imagination. I like to encourage circumnavigation, strange postures, and a certain feeling of getting away with something.