CONNECTIONS
I often invite the unexpected into my practice by engaging the world directly through projects of intervention and collaboration, which can only happen outside of the private space of my studio. These may take diverse forms such as as environmental interventions (Bornholm Project), interactions with various communities (We are Working All the Time, Ellensburg Constructs), an international word-exchange (Palavras), a made-up library (Scientia Library Project) or a non-profit research lab (Slip Rabbit Studio). Still, they share a larger context of investigation of how we—as individuals, communities, disciplines, and cultures—come to make sense and know of things togerher.
More literally speaking, House of Reason and many of my fiber and mixed media pieces, such as Slippage, Insomnia, Cover to Cover..., the In Between and Positions series, is built from thousands of tiny connections. Each joint, each connection is simple, yet in them being together the resilience of the resulting structure is not to be underestimated. While my pieces are grounded in the tactile experience of the materials, they are also ephemeral. Their physical fragility also reflects on the temporal and subjective nature of human relations. The art making process is a way to scrutinize messy human states: consciousness, memory, weakness and resilience, courage, love, desire, and loss, and in doing so, ponder the experience of being caught up between competing possibilities of rationality and emotion.
In early 2017, I founded an experimental studio, Slip Rabbit, for research and education in digital ceramics, which I still direct. I proposed this studio as a challenge and an alternative to academic education in the arts. Its dialogic, collaborative nature spans across disciplines and provides access points to the generative process to a wide variety of students, collaborators and researchers. I consider the Studio as a laboratory for not only "what can be made and how" with 3D printing technology in ceramics but also for how creative communities build themselves under our current cultural, economic and social paradigm.
