Artist Statement
My artistic practice explores synesthetic, multi-sensory experiences, allowing for divergent senses to interact – scent, tactility, visuality. I am interested in creating arrangements of charged matrices of perception within space, taste, scent, sight, sound, fictional/personal narrative, morphing of flavor and distinction, visual dyslexia, located/un-located memory and association, metabolisms, cross sensory metaphors.

Throughout my practice there exists an aggressive treatment of tactility, employing surface textures that simultaneously invite and repel touch. I impose violent techniques on delicate, fragile materials to expose vulnerability, stages of metamorphosis, and delineate different strains of matter and perishability in order to bring out other qualities, to address questions of purity, beauty, perishability, and decay. Perishable materials appear often in my work. I'm interested in perishability for its affect, its aesthetic qualities, and its resistance to archive, permanence, and monumentality.

Scent is a recurring component in my work. I use it sculpturally and linguistically- to tap into memory and the intangible, to create a presence through absence. It's not a substitute but an extension: I use scent when I want to extend the senses, perceptual rings in the visual and the olfactory-- all triggers for creating ellipses in consciousness. The oak aging liquids, Supernova Sauce, soap paintings, the fried flowers, fried envelope, Glade Plug In Smart Water bottle, smuggle balls with the scratch n sniff sticker all encapsulate these ideas.

Surface umami is another idea that I work with frequently. It's the fifth sense, that which is "savoriness" -- one of the basic tastes sensed by specialized receptor cells present on the human and animal tongue. I like to imbue the works with a sense of umami: it can be visual, cerebral, tactile, tasteful. I'm interested in extending the way we view art beyond the visual into more uncharted sensorial territories.