Installation view, Q20: Wellesley Faculty Artists, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA.

Artist’s Statement

In my recent work I have attempted to ignore the limiting labels of “Art,” “Architecture,” “Design,” and “Craft” while still acknowledging the histories of materials and traditional processes of making. I continue to ask: who and what do objects represent? Whom do they serve, and how do we interact with them? This work has also been informed by utilitarian modernist ideas, and the structures of modularity and pattern. I have explored these interests through many processes, including quilting the industrial insulation, Tyvek Home Wrap, which I use to explore notions of interior and exterior domestic space and gender. Quilting also traditionally combines remnants of fabric to produce functional works and I have applied this “quilting remnants” methodology to other repurposed materials, such as fragments of reclaimed architecture. These are combined with shared parameters to connect the seemingly disparate castaways. Many of the three dimensional forms I construct in this manner have been representations of ubiquitous milk crates. These too often appear in the urban environment as castaways but they are owned by corporations and as text on the crates states, you will be “punished by law for their misuse.” Yet these are regularly used by the lowest socio-economic strata as containers for belongings, as furniture, and as placeholders for the body. They are substantial, resilient, political forms. Milk crates can assemble, occupy, and resist. This is why I am drawn to represent these functional forms and make them my own.