Artist's Statement • Spring 2010
During 2008 – 2010, I took a two-year hiatus from my undergraduate program in Glass at the Rhode Island School of Design. Previously, in my studio work, I'd been trying to resolve my beginner's skills in offhand glassblowing with extremely cerebral notions of secrecy, bodily shame and disfigurement, digital culture––and facing much frustration. For a period, I engaged in a series of digital video pieces for a course taken with Daniel Peltz, as well as for my glass studio class with Bruce Chao and Jocelyne Prince. I was also working with lithographic processes and independently continuing my work in black & white darkroom photography. I found that I was avoiding glass as a material because I felt my prowess in the hotshop did not live up to the sophistication or clarity I desired from my art.
I lived and worked in Providence during those two years away from RISD, pursuing independent studies at The Steel Yard, Penland and Haystack schools of craft to learn various ceramics and casting techniques. I also lived and worked with various local arts collectives such as 17 Mules and the Dirt Palace to create a different sort of “livable” art, a.k.a. alternative living/performance/studio spaces, and found that I was interested in very different, physical concerns about comfort, survival and occupancy.
I also worked extensively with middle school youth, and I find that the themes of curiosity, confusion, didacticism and ignorance arose during this period. I find the state of unknowing to be as compelling as utter control and whole knowledge. The process of slow and organic discovery is one that influenced me greatly during my material experimentation this past Spring. Especially in my work with mathematically-informed shapes, I was referencing my own lifelong difficulty with numerals and geometry, as well as a broader murky state of incomprehension and obfuscation that develops when one delves into an area of study not one's own.
During my return to college this semester, I attempted to teach myself multiple unfamiliar processes in an effort to jumpstart material curiosity. I revisited glassblowing, which I had been away from for several years and had lost nearly all touch with. I taught myself how to tattoo using an electrical gun. I worked with porcelain and low-fire clays and experimented with multiple firing techniques. I was especially interested in the material compatibilities and working techniques for glass and clay, attempting to join the technology (kilns and temperatures, expansion, etc.) and methods (applying heat, elasticity and plasticity) such that both materials might survive and be shaped successfully.
In “Mathematical Setting 1,” I was attempting to explore the connections between mathematical language/thought, and visual information. How do humans decode a complex equation or visualize a multidimensional shape? The types of forms I was researching––that is, polychora––are impossible to visualize in any full or complete way, because humans lack the faculties to perceive and operate on more than three spatial dimensions. Thus, I was interested in the translations that take place from pure form, to two-dimensional schema, to objects so far beyond conceptual that they ceas to hold any authority at all. I created handmade lace doilies, objects that are barely even utilitarian but rather decorative; fluff. I used various diagrams of polychora as templates for these objects. I then paired them with hand-blown and hot sculpted glass forms that referenced both the mathematical and the utilitarian. I designed each tool or utensil to give the appearance of usefulness, without actually divulging their specific usage. The result was a table setting comprised of inscrutable and essentially useless objects, residing in the strange grey area between design, sculpture and math.
In a project influenced by the table setting, created for a joint archaeology/ceramics class, I created a series of tools in bare porcelain with extremely specific purposes, tailored to my hand and body. A tool for picking the space between my right front third and fourth teeth; an weight fitted to the curves of my tongue to prevent me from over-speaking; a tiny dish imprinted with the shape of my palm. I was attempting to develop an arsenal of private tools, inaccessible to others.
Finally, in my creation of Appendisil™, I was interested in the nature of bodily loss and the various psychological phenomena that lead to the very human state of “missing” something. I wanted to understand if such feelings of loss could be artificially provoked through the creation of a believable universe of products and literature. I worked extensively on the research behind surgical procedures, the medical industry, the language of promotional material for pre-existing implant processes for breasts and testicles. With the creation of an overflow or surplus of language surrounding a simple, invented phenomenon, I wanted to also understand the influence of ruthless marketing tactics on the more tenuous nature of human desire.
I feel that currently my interests as an artist lie in creating believable objects for unnecessary uses. In my work with “Private Arsenal” and “Mathematical Setting,” I was interested specifically in the idea of tool and utility. For the Appendisil™ project, I was interested in marketing human want and exploring corporeal loss. As a student and as a writer, I'm also interested in the uses of literature and written text in conjunction with sculptural materials, as well as the research project that accompanies the execution of a sculptural work. My recent time at RISD has also seen a return materially to glassblowing and a renewed interest in glass as a material, in addition to the various casting and ceramics processes that I've pursued in my time out of school.