Artist Statement
My practice is informed by the history of labor in the American South and its relationship to collective memory. My practice questions how collective memory informs personal and societal ideologies and how this is embodied in and dispersed through materials. How does memory coalesce in objects and sites? How can objects deconstruct historical, communal, and personal myths? How does land function as a storehouse for memory? My work investigates the legitimacy of what is remembered and memorialized.
I examine labor utilizing repetitive acts- a conversation between process and materials in systemized production. I explore how labor assigns value and meaning to materials and objects. Making my work becomes a ritual as I deconstruct and reconstruct materials- taking many small things, piecing them into a whole, and making repetitive marks. Through the use of historical and culturally significant materials, including indigo, collected and found objects, and clay, my work examines the inherited histories of materials and how our interactions with these things inform memory. Sewing, natural dying, traditional ceramic processes, and metalsmithing create a visual language of labor. These methods transform the conceptual approach to my work into a manual process. My work takes the form of vessels, sculpturally and symbolically, standing as sites or carriers of objects, memory, and labor.
