Artist Statement

I am a visual artist and economist currently exploring works on paper, sculpture, and installation. My work is informed by my experience working on climate change policy and the feelings of anxiety and grief this work induced. In my artistic practice, I am ironically rejecting commodity-based value systems and attempting to mitigate ecological harm by repurposing post-consumer products. Simple and accessible materials that are considered disposable or have been discarded, usually plastic and other trash harvested from the local environment, feature heavily. These ‘trash’ materials are transformed into precious objects, confounding the value of (and revalorizing) the material itself.

I explore the nature-culture divide from a materialist perspective. Elements of repetition and pattern reference industrial (re)production and cycles of creation and destruction. Ecological catastrophe, loss, and the rapid plastification of the world are often presented using humor and the absurd. Another central theme is the ‘mistaking’ of one subject for another. I transform familiar objects into near-likeness alternatives, creating absurd slant rhymes. This ‘mis-taking’ refers to the cycle of resources being extracted – taken – from the ‘natural’ world only for them to be made into objects that destroy the very world they came from.