Artist Statement

My sculptural assemblages explore the plight of the human condition within the erosion of time. Through body casts, concrete, machine parts, and cultural fragments, I build objects that reflect on impermanence, transformation, and the fragile grace that runs through all things.

The movement I feel most closely connected to is West Coast Assemblage Art, a movement that emerged in California in the 1950s. Growing up in Los Angeles, I was surrounded by a world of art that included artists such as Ed Kienholz and Michael C. McMillen, both of whom had a profound influence on me.

When I was seventeen, I saw the work of Ed Kienholz at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. His use of found materials and life casts to create powerful commentary on American politics, social justice, and cultural identity was electrifying. Around that same time I encountered the work of Rebecca Horn. Her kinetic sculptures were violent, feminine, visceral—both shocking and beautiful. Seeing her work move and breathe in space expanded my understanding of what sculpture could be.

Those experiences made something click for me. Seeing artists use found materials, the human body, and constructed environments to speak about the world convinced me that art could carry powerful meaning. If artists like Kienholz and Horn were making work like this, it opened the possibility that I could explore my own voice through sculpture.

My father was a commercial graphic artist in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 70s, and growing up we were always making art together. He taught me how to draw and gave me the confidence that I could build any creative idea I had. As a child I was also an avid model builder, deeply engaged in creating miniatures and claymation films. Later, seeing the work of Michael C. McMillen and his miniature suburban wastelands had a profound influence on the direction my work would take. From that point forward, my work has consistently incorporated body casts, found objects, and miniatures as essential elements of my practice.

I have observed decay to be a reminder of the fragile grace that runs through all things. I find beauty in what is ancient. Rust, weathering, decay—these marks of impermanence are where I find reverence.

My artwork is inspired by a childhood fantasy of our modern time as an archaeological discovery unearthed in the future. As a child, discovering dinosaurs got me thinking about the passage of time, and it occurred to me that we are also part of the fossil record—that we are no exception to the passage of time nor immune to it as a species. A particular moment when this idea was cemented for me was seeing the film Planet of the Apes and the scene where Charlton Heston discovers the Statue of Liberty as a relic of a collapsed, bygone America.

Consequently my work draws from a lifelong fascination with archaeology, industrial ruins, obsolete machinery, ghost towns, and shipwrecks. Living in the woods has deepened this inquiry, introducing the quiet authority of natural cycles—life, death, regeneration. The intersection of the synthetic and the organic, the manufactured and the primal, forms the foundation of my investigation.

I explore the human condition alongside the inevitable erosion of time. Art making is where I return to the reality that this life, and everything we build within it, is temporary. I am interested in imagining our world thousands of years from now—our technologies, monuments, and everyday objects reduced to artifacts or fragments and reclaimed by natural forces. What appears permanent to us is, in truth, already in the process of disintegration.

Within this framework I explore our plight both personal and societal: personal wounds, emotional growth, American identity, war, religion, and cultural memory.

My sculptures manifest out of a search for the interplay of materials and their metaphorical meanings which form abstract and suggestive narratives. I am always searching for metaphors in materials and their relationships. My work is mixed media; whatever materials serve the feeling I aim for are included. The figurative work often involves body casts, integrating human forms with found and fabricated materials.

I employ found objects of all kinds—embedded bones, circuit boards, cast figures, toy cars and airplanes, antique weapons, religious icons, scrap metal, gears, mechanical parts, pottery, and arrowheads. These objects tell a story. Through assemblage, they become artifacts of a speculative archaeology. I am particularly interested in the interplay of the human body with crumbling architecture and technological remnants that form a mandala-like symmetry. I aim for these combinations to convey something transcendent about being human in our time.

I approach art making as a way to offer a visceral experience of the wonder of impermanence: the slow breaking down of technology, the vulnerability of the human body, and the tension between our intellectual brilliance and our primal origins. My sculptures are not memorials to collapse, but homages to the humility of time’s passage. They are offerings that ask us to see beauty in transience and to honor the fleeting nature of what we call progress.

My search is not for a trivial dystopian display but rather to illustrate in the most visceral way the magic, horror and wonder of our world and what it is to be human in our time.