WANDERLUST
I travel extensively. Artist residencies satisfy a wanderlust, allowing me to be both an outsider and an insider in relationship to a foreign environment. I draw meaning from locally available materials, serendipitous encounters, and cultural constructs. Being away is always a chance to observe how structures of social/cultural/behavioral systems are created and how thought and action is shaped within and in relationship to these. My ongoing word-exchange interaction, Palavras, started in Rio de Janeiro and travelled to Venice, Budapest, Berlin, and Seattle. In each city, I made a local printing set with various type collected from the streets. Also in Brazil, I created and exhibited Parlor Games: Axioms, an installation, which centers around an animated drawing of a dog who can’t decide whether to stay on or to leave. Axioms constructs materials—black hair extensions, carnival party-wares, native seedlings, asphalt and vulcanized rubber—into a (foreigner's) experience of contemporary Brazil.
I explored a five centuries-old tradition, “Koningschieten,” of Northern European archery guilds in Price of Perfection, part of the installation Parlor Games: Scientia.
The Unexpected Momentum of Small Things, an installation with handmade paper, sewn and cut felt, motion sensor activated video projection and sound, was inspired by the physical landscape and the history of land use and development while at a residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop in upstate New York. The installation space itself calls attention to the nature of visible and invisible boundaries. When the viewer is staying either inside or outside of the pink fence that bounds the enclosure, she is surrounded by a quiet and serene scape of snowfall in the woods. This equilibrium is quickly broken when crossing the boundary. For several seconds, the landscape shifts, rocks, wobbles, then repositions itself.
Similarly, The Bornholm Project: What is Beauty if not the Uncontainable Held for a Brief Moment? was inspired by the waxing and waning ceramics history of Bornholm, Denmark. Taking the form of the island’s distance markers, 77 roughly shaped blocks of clay were placed along several bicycle routes. The blocks, made of local clays, held a tiny fragile sculpture made of imported porcelain materials.
Experiments in Being Lost—created at the European Ceramic Work Center, 's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands—is a series of ten slipcast life-size bone china umbrellas. Each umbrella shape is a self-contained universe codified in an abridged map of a some-place where I used to live, with its white carved lines revealing a psychogeography to the touch but not to vision.
