I spend my time empathizing with small details of the drips, squishes, and blooms I find; exploring the private spaces of my body for forms that speak to me of big mysteries. In an exploration and sometimes hyper-realistic study of the human form, I search out and distill parts of me that sag, swell, squirt, and pucker.
When isolated from the rest of the body, orifices, splashes and drips begin to echo and resonate with objects and phenomenon outside of myself. An anus taken out of scale starts to look like a flower or a depiction of geological forces underground. A squirt reminds me of an apparition appearing from nowhere, or that first moment life materialized from nothingness.
I observe the body, sculpt the body form as I see it, consider some "otherness" in the form, and then change something to take it closer to that "otherness". When I first saw a picture of an anus I was awestruck. I had never thought of an anus in any visual sense. What struck me was that this thing, whose sole purpose was to muscularly push out, looked like it was sucking in. When I sculpted the anus large (the first one was nine feet high), it became a huge hungry hole that seemed to have a life and intelligence of its own. The hole seemed to stare, push out, and suck in. When I cast the anus and pulled it off the wall, it had a hint of a splash, or vortex appearing out of nowhere. To accentuate the qualities that were not anus, the qualities of some otherness, I cut the perimeter of the form, changing the anus from a perfectly round frontal silhouette to a wavy, splashy one. The result was a higher energy splash, one that was quicker and more instantaneous. At some point I thought of things or concepts that appear out of nothing, the Big Bang theory. The anus form has an expanding and contracting dynamic that I imagine when visualizing the Big Bang theory. An anus is also very essential and basic to existence, and in this way similar to something as fundamental as creation. Everything has a moment of birth and everyone has to consume and excrete. The Big Bang was our moment of birth. To make my anus splash into a Big Bang, I added a second splash to the backside of the first. Big Bang looks as though it is a model of a phenomenon that burst out from a single point. Big Bang is solid and formless, bodily and botanical, stagnant and instantaneous.
I want my work to confront the viewer about his or her body, causing reflection. I want my work to make people question their acts of labeling, categorizing and naming. I am also interested in dissecting beauty, in the act of finding the sublime in the unnoticed and abject parts of our-selves. Most important, I am interested in finding clues that lead me to mysteries.