Artist Statement 2025

I have spent countless summer afternoons wandering the woods around my family’s cabin in northern Minnesota since the age of eight. Little did I realize how much this unstructured play and exploration would become the backbone of my identity and my studio practice. These days, I prefer venturing out late in the day, when shadows are long, skies are dramatic, and the afternoon heat is dissipating. Sometimes I take my camera. The investigations that define and inspire my studio practice are not unlike my forest meanderings: The searching and darting of eyes and mind through the landscape, and longing to zoom further out and further in function as a model for how work takes shape, and for how I would hope an audience approaches my art.

My work has evolved from weaving fabric on floor looms, to Eva Hesse-inspired mixed-media, to welding life-size steel and paper pulp sculptures, to the physical manipulation of photographic prints on paper. Inspiration for my work has consistently been rooted in the tactile, the language of materials and process, and finding my way to something compelling through trial, error, and investigation. Fractal-like, iterative pattern is a common theme in my work, as are the contrast of meticulous, labor-intensive process with improvisation (images 1-3).

As digital imaging emerged as a viable studio tool in the mid-nineties, my focus pivoted from life-size sculpture to digital processes and smaller scale sculptures. Still years away from acquiring a digital camera, I used a flatbed scanner to scan plants collected from the familiar woods around my family’s cabin, transferring the resulting inkjet prints onto newly formed sheets of handmade paper. As digital technology advanced, I shifted to printing on Japanese papers to create ‘skins’ on collapsible lantern forms, some of which were stand-alone sculptures, while others were parts of installations. Pushing the limits of materials and technologies and embracing the evocative translucency of Japanese papers provided rich ground for creating new work. I was also drawing inspiration from sculptors and fiber artists, including  Ruth Asawa, Ann Hamilton, Martin Puryear, and John McQueen.

 I turned my attention to found materials in 2015 and began assembling collected birch twigs into structures based on Platonic solids. Further development of these small sculptures led to Ode to The Trees (images 11-12). The twig tetrahedrons hanging from threads are reminiscent of armatures of my earlier sculpture, while referencing the geometry of crystal structures, the cosmos, and gestural qualities of trees. 

 In 2020 I began weaving again. Drawing and painting on book pages led to cutting pages into squares for origami, which led to cutting out and weaving strips of text. Experiments with hand-plaiting text led to combining text with strips of photographs printed on Japanese paper, resulting in pieces that felt more visually and conceptually complex, possessing greater potential for metaphor and connections between text and image. These experiments led to the mandala and ellipse pieces (images 5–10). Combining photo-based inkjet prints, texts from naturalists and philosophers, and traditional weaving drafts has resulted in modes of thinking, responding, and assembling that are new yet familiar in terms of relationships and chance juxtapositions between pattern, structure, text, and image. On the one hand, the text functions as visual texture and contrast, and on the other, it is content and message, as partially readable prose in some pieces (images 1, 3, 6) , and resembling Dadaist poetry in others  (Images 8-10).  The ellipse and mandala imply objects in space, metaphors for the earth, moon, or a microcosm. In smaller pieces, weaving patterns start to function pictorially as landscape (Image 1 right).

 Recent land stewardship projects on the family property in northern Minnesota have involved clearing out dead spruce, planting trees for climate resilience, and caging 400 seedling trees to protect them from deer browse. For me, these activities, and their motivations and rewards have much in common with artmaking. They inform my studio work as greater knowledge and awareness of species and the impacts of climate change. Increasing extremes in weather have become immediate and real as our property and outbuildings flooded in 2024,  and in 2025, the Brimson-Complex Fire started less than half a mile from our cabin, burning the surrounding forests and the homes of friends and neighbors.  In response to these events, I have begun utilizing photographs of water, the fire and burn area, and texts relating to human behavior and our natural environment for a series of plaited paper pieces to foreground issues of consequence, resilience, and responsibility to the environment.