The Trouble with Nostalgia
I am a scavenger and gleaner. As I move through the constructed landscapes of urban and suburban spaces, I find myself reaching down to collect bits and pieces of roadways, sidewalks, and crumbling architecture. These chunks of brick and concrete are geological in their presence: signifiers of the Anthropocene epoch, constructed by the actions of humanity rather than the forces of nature.
My habit of collecting also extends to natural world. The foliage that I am compelled to gather and preserve tends toward the fleeting and the unwanted: weeds collected by the roadside, branches and leaves trimmed from hedges, shrubs and trees removed to improve the view, and flowers picked as they begin to wilt and fade. In the studio, I alter this plant material in various ways to obscure and abstract the once recognizable flowers and leaves, stripping them of their familiar connotations.
These disparate objects find union in my sculptural installation The Trouble with Nostalgia (The cadaver is its own image). The precise and skeletal structure frames a natural form that has been dispossessed and made luminous, almost radioactive. Between the lifeless fragments of concrete, a host of porcelain grubs breaks through the soil, searching.