Site: South Coast
Hand-built sculpture animates architectural fixtures, passages, and barriers such as windows, walls, doorknobs, and fences. These architectural specifics are designed to separate or support passage or use, and are potent metaphorically in speaking about the way in which personal connections can be made or thwarted. Each enduring in various states of care, reuse, and neglect, reflecting the passage of time, physicalize history and change, becoming part of a collective history and memory - like real characters in imagined histories that respond to the complexity of human connection with others, objects, and experiences.
To live apart from something, that is, to exist separate, evokes feelings of isolation, loss, desire and longing. These are powerful emotions that elicit a wide range of reactions. Most interesting to me are the reactions that show someone’s intensity of effort to alter their separation. This body of work is inspired by these efforts and reflects on how separation can strengthen, maintain, or remove feelings of disconnect.
Each sculpture animates architectural fixtures, passages, and barriers such as windows, walls, doorknobs, and fences. These architectural specifics are designed to separate or support passage or use, and are potent metaphorically in speaking about the way in which personal connections can be made or thwarted. Architectural spaces within the urban setting also endure in various states of care, reuse, and neglect that reflect the passage of time. The significant presence of time reinforces a sense of loss and detachment. It is in the states of these architectural spaces that I find an opportunity to reflect on human relationships with separation.
As a structure endures, it becomes a part of a collective history and memory. Through the passing of time and change of need, the old buildings and vacant spaces in New Bedford, Massachusetts are now an icon for the history and memory they represent. This body of work uses an architectural language inspired from in and around New Bedford, to physicalize history and change, reflecting on conceptual and metaphorical relationships between living space, history, memory, and the discarded.