My creative research is rooted in examinations of language, materiality, and information systems and how these mediators of experience are synthesized and translated to construct understandings of our world and our selves. In contemplating translation as a process of negotiation by which something moves from one space to another, I’ve concentrated on the nature and placement of the membranes and borders that differentiate those spaces. It is through the lenses of my interest in architecture, institutions, ancestry, and history that I consider container forms more broadly as a means to inspect how integral the delineations of a system’s boundaries are to the framing of things like definitions and narratives. 

 

This investigation of containers began with the codex and archival methods like file folders as a way to contextualize letter forms and words as the smallest units of inquiry within a recursive organizational structure that, in turn, grows to the level of architecture and paradigms. My ongoing project, Collected Sayings, a stack of handmade folders made of pulped dictionaries, began as something of a travel journal – a means to gather images and ephemera alongside my own observational notes and marks – but has grown into a mutable archive and visual diary. Through this collection, I have built a system through which I can materially engage with my eternally shifting relationship with my memory and my sense of self.

 

More recently, I have turned to the exploration of shipping materials as physical and metaphorical tools to consider the communicative forms we create to bridge the gap between thought and expression, and eventually deliver messages to one another. Plaster casts of bubble wrap, beeswax coated prints that enshroud like honey-comb cushioning paper, facsimile security envelopes covered in warped scans of the tiled mosaics, and ink drawings of ancient funerary urns all serve to encase a fragile semblance of interiority and together allude to to their dual roles of protecting and occluding the objects ostensibly held within. Through iterative installations, assemblages, and collages, I build spatial and syntactic arrangements of printed media, sculptural forms, and found objects that serve to network relationships that interrogate the social, historical, and symbolic conventions surrounding repositories of cultural memory.