Artist Statement
I am from southern Louisiana where there is a rare folk culture that is thriving, but caught between a culture of sameness on one end, and the fast approaching Gulf of Mexico on the other.  It’s a region where global problems of cultural homogenization and environmental destruction are particularly concentrated and magnified. There is an impermanence and sense of play there that makes Louisiana’s culture so tragic and beautiful.  I am interested in the circle of life, illustrated there so poignantly. Experiencing natural disasters has lent my work an awareness of time, an urgency. I am interested in leisure time and the outdoors, in being adaptive, and in making do.
        My work is both playful and dark.  Coils of rope are decorative nautical arrangements and pools of blood or oil.  Holes punctured in the work function as peep holes or children’s games. I like to work with materials at hand: tin cans, food, scrap wood.  I am drawn toward objects that can repeat to form patterns gesturing toward Folk art and Minimalism.  Recently I have become interested in cages and traps, after spending time crabbing down south.  I admire the way crab traps rust over time, how they stack like bricks, and how birds pick them clean.  When watching crabs in a trap, most of them are feasting on the bait, unaware of the danger they are in.  Only the ones that have tried to get out realize that they have been blindsided.  Cages can be protective too, like chain mail.  I am interested in the ambiguity of appearances and the link between sinister and protective.  We really never know what we are getting into until we are in it.  In the sculpture, Its a trap!,  the baguette is a phallic symbol that cracks jokes about the cliche of women trapping men.  The baguette also suggests the romanticized life of the artist.
         Problem Solved investigates a desire to appear official, representing a personal triumph over my failure to attach a potato to a poster in the fourth grade. At the time, the poster was the required vehicle for presenting information.  Haunted by the memory of a potato lying on the ground beneath an empty poster before my presentation, the question, “Why didn’t you think outside of the box/poster?” surfaced occasionally, but I suppressed it.  
        The Forest, The Forest, The Forest is composed of the first three pages of a Time-Life book.  The pages carry the anxiety of a quickening culture.  Rather than entering deep into the forest (or a book about the forest), we stand at its precipice, endlessly repeating while looking for the next big thing.
         My favorite places to visit are national forests and parks, natural history museums, and cultural institutions.  I feel that Giant Sequoias, mountains, marble statues, and pyramids are all in it for the long haul, making their mark, sharing with me a celebration of the wondrous and a collective fear of death and inconsequentiality.  Marveling at their endurance is reassuring, however the thought of spending so much time creating my own monument seems futile.  The immediacy of my work shares in the experience of being here now, and all of the uncertainty and community that sentiment has to offer.