I have a mistrust of beauty, I think about window-shopping and gazes at an economy of ugliness.

I think about beauty being a weapon against nature, and if I want to be part of a world that enacts this. I find visual beauty in the sand blasted plastics on beaches and eroded Styrofoam chunks that litter our oceans through the repulsion of what they represent.

I feel defined by the scavenge and horde, the look and collect.

I collect and hoard to bring traces of these burdens to an audience through digital documentation and (basic) photo manipulation onto recognizable and usable surfaces. I am trying to find beauty through faking it- through the balance and contradiction of imposter syndrome versus amateurism. Of the handmade and the mass-produced.

I am seduced by minimalism, but my work cannot live in the slickness of the paired down, with many hands, with engagement, the tableaus are open to chaos, to change. Much of my practice is rooted in scavenging materials from salvage yards and the dumpsters outside of a home under renovation. There is little logic with what gets picked up and turned into material for molds, surfaces and assemblage, and what is left behind. I see surfaces standing in for reflective pools and things standing in for moments of grief. Formal abstraction is just as informative as the arrangement of knick-knacks in the living room.