Artist Statement:

“Trauma ebbs and flows 
It is unstable and unknown 
A terrain of progress 
While you weep, 
Lean on your willows 
The only way to stabilize, 
……is to lean” 

Through textiles, sculpture, casting and performance I explore the potential of materiality and labor to transform trauma into catharsis. I am a deeply interdisciplinary artist with a background in metalwork, craft and dance. In many ways, I sought to become an artist because I needed to overcome my own trauma. Reconstructing, reforming and transforming trauma through craft based processes have allowed me to turn a negative into a positive. 

My background is rooted in metal sculpture. Early on in my career I fell in love with the labor-intensive rituals and community of metal casting. I experienced a sense of power and strength by working with these materials, bending steel to my will, and casting molten hot metal.  I was mesmerized by the process of  forcing hard materials into something soft, and molten and then reforming it. Iron pours are also incredibly communal events. I enjoyed being surrounded by a group of fellow female artists who, like me, love pouring metal. 

One of my most recent works “Post Traumatic Growth” is a large-scale installation of shredded bed sheets that create a landscape of varying heights. The soft growths— or peaks and valleys, as I refer to them—represent the path followed when walking hand-in-hand  with one’s trauma is an unknown landscape that requires patience to navigate. Like my good and bad days, the work crescendos and decrescendos, as if traversing an unknown terrain. 20’ x 20’ in scale, the enormity of these installations makes the viewer feel the immense possibilities of post-traumatic growth. 

Another recent installation is “leaning.” I cast 15 pairs of lips. The delicate sculptures are cast out of ripped bedsheets. The result is a delicate soft material that is violent in its materiality. The pairs of lips gently lean on each other in order to remain upright. In each pair, one set of lips is my own and the other is someone from my  support system–other graduate students, students in general, family members, friends,  and even my first therapist who walked me through the act of surviving my sexual  assault when it first happened. The work references the ability to give and receive support. To be in a community, like these lips, is to lean. 

The third iteration of this series, Take Me With You is resin-cast willow blossoms  suspended from the ceiling. Embedded in the cast willow blossom is a single fiber  from the original bedsheets where my sexual assault occurred. The work is installed  so that the blossoms are attached from treelike formations that extend from the  ceiling. In an intimate performance I encouraged audience members to pluck one of the cast willow blossoms to take with them. I hoped to release the burden of my traumatic material in the public in the form of seeds. 

I also create large scale public art works that combine metalwork and textiles to create hammock like spaces where the public can rest. Often these works formally reference notions of seeds or “blossoming.” Although these works are much more open because of their public context, I still reference intensive labor techniques, the potential of growth and the abilities of communities to lean on one another.


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