Artist Statement

My attention goes first to the forces inside a place or an object: what is moving, what is resisting, what is giving way, and on what timescale. The physics of motion is the layer of the world that reads most clearly to me. Water finding its course, land rising and wearing away, a body moving through terrain. These share a single logic of pressure, resistance, and release.

I know that logic through my body before I know it through analysis. On a mountain bike, nearly all of my attention lives in the rear wheel, its traction and trajectory, my weight feeding it the grip it needs, while the line I choose follows the path of least resistance. In those moments I am not observing the physics. I am inside them. The same attention governs the studio. A resin pour is felt through viscosity, surface tension, and timing rather than calculated. Decisions arrive as sensations before they arrive as reasons.

I work forward from fascination rather than from a thesis. An image forms, and I build toward it, researching the systems and procedures the piece demands. Meaning accrues through the making and settles afterward. The waterfalls I built in school came from the same instinct: a way to sit with moving water long enough to understand it, and to hold what I saw. Building this work is the most direct way I have of standing inside these questions rather than only thinking about them.

The current work translates elevation and bathymetric data into relief sculpture in hardwood and resin. A landform that reads as fixed is still becoming, shaped by forces that remain active long after any observer has looked away. The resin's translucency is structural to the idea, keeping the ground beneath the water in view so that each piece holds forces acting across several timescales at once. Researching a place's geology means entering a system in motion: how it was formed, what is reshaping it now, and where it is headed. The finished piece holds all three. The forms follow the geometry those forces produce: eased and continuous where water worked slowly, abrupt where the ground broke or the ice cut.

A second thread runs through the work: our attachment to place. A landscape becomes part of how we understand ourselves, even as we occupy it only briefly, while the place travels on beneath our feet. That overlap of timescales, attachment measured in decades against ground measured in epochs, is where the work's human meaning lives. When I look at a finished piece, I see the forces that shaped the place. Someone else sees a place they know.

Wood, resin, and topography are the current vocabulary for this inquiry, not its conclusion. The work ahead moves further into motion and time as subjects in their own right, and into a wider range of materials to hold them. Where the inquiry leads, I intend to follow it.