Material tests provide intimate pieces that feel like moments captured. My material tests often come from creating new ways of making; my working methods come from a variation on a conventional way a material is formed and used in a process, such as mold making. Traditional techniques are learned, then subverted. Within a process I watch how materials change over time. The entire course of transformation can be the most alive part.
Some of my most important observations come from failure, both within process as well as within individual pieces. Observed failure is harnessed and used to my advantage in the next generation of my work. Through the material investigations and tests, through observation and learning, I make discoveries. I see a worthwhile moment or idea within an unexpected outcome and mine it, pick it apart until it often doesn’t resemble the process of origin at all.
There is a continuous dialogue between the object created and the action that created it. They inform one another, one could not exist without the other. Bind, hack, elongate, peel - verbs describing a material dissection, an investigation of character. Repetition is a returning - an expansion of time. Repetition is in the rhythm of labor; motion made continuously to complete a task, to reach an end result. The limits of our body, our personal thresholds, are found within our repetition.
Touch is a physicality - it is personal and intimate, a drawing together of two spaces. This moment of touch forms a boundary where one thing ends and another begins. In this shift there is a sharing and acquisition of information. Material has its own physicality, and through touch informs our own bodies physicality. A membrane separates layers, shifts from one thing to another. It is in these shifts that a change happens, a place of transformation. Within that is a place of both gain and instability – an area of pure possibility. With possibility comes the potential for rupture. Just as a beginning is a change, so is an ending, and everything must have both. Destruction of an object is an ending, but can also be the beginning of a new one.