My artwork focuses on my own emotions and experiences. Utilizing installation, sculpture, painting, and printmaking, I recreate my emotions and experiences for the viewer to share in and connect with what is being represented or recreated in the artwork. The pieces become conduits for others to tap into and share in the experience.
In my Body Language series, I used rebar and tie wire to create figures to show emotions through body language. The figures have a rebar skeleton that has been welded together, creating a strong-looking foundation or armature for the tie wire. The tie wire fills out the figures while leaving spaces to view the underlying rusted rebar; the smooth clean surface of the wire contrasting with the rugged rusted texture of the rebar. The figures themselves become semi-abstracted in the sense that they are not realistic and are not meant to be exact copies of the people whose measurements were taken to build the armature. The “Mind Blurbs” on the walls flow in and out of the walls and close to the figures as manifestations of the thoughts and emotions of the figures. These “Mind Blurbs” are made of clusters of black tie-wire that are not fully opaque, rather they are left as skeletal tubes that play between being visually two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Smaller figures can be found within the tie-wire clusters as tiny representations for the thoughts and emotions that the “Mind Blurbs” contain. Dealing with memories or experiences, Body Language utilizes abstraction to allow the viewer to feel the work without there being a set interpretive direction.
Abstraction is used in my paintings as well to express my thoughts through the colours chosen and the handling of the paint. When working with paint, focus on a memory or a scene to guide the colours and paint application. I use my hands rather than a brush to apply the paint to allow myself to become fully absorbed in the process. Through this process, my movements become a part of the painting and assist the viewer in experiencing and connecting with the work on a deeper level. My prints, though not abstracted, carries similar themes as my painting and sculptures. Landscapes are used to calm the viewer, while figures are used to make the viewer think about themselves in similar situations. The prints I make are often small to force the viewer to look closer in an almost intimate way. I want the viewer to share in experiencing the emotions and thoughts of the figures and paintings to better connect and interact with the artwork.