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Artist Statement

My work is an exploration of our present age, looked at through the lens of the past. What social structures, systems of thought and ideas have created the strata upon which current thought and philosophies exist? I can only understand this technological age of whirling ideas, transient thoughts, and spiritual disconnects by asking how it is we have come to this place historically. At the root of my creative process is a contemplation of the delicacy of life, wondering what will remain of our works and us when our time has become another time. This focus has been nourished by studying and teaching art history but especially came to life when I recently spent two months at an artist residency in southern France. Layers of past civilizations lie in remnants, lacing the region with an evocative essence.

 

Much of what I read influences my work. I have been greatly touched by the art of Anselm Keifer, not specifically his technique, but more so the content. He too looks at the history of his homeland haunted with traces of Nazi Germany that shaped his time. He also grapples with spiritual issues that have confronted his past and present state.

 

Much of the layering of materials in my pieces, sometimes added and later torn away, becomes symbolic of how I view the uncertain nature of what remains of the past and where I fit into to the overall scheme. I am forever asking the question in my work, “What shred of my life will become part of the ruins of the future’s past and what part of who I am is a part of the past that lives on in me?” 

 

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past…”

“In my beginning is my end. In succession

Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,

Are removed, destroyed, or in their place

Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.”

”What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.”

              —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets