I am an object maker and installation artist. My artistic practice is based on social alienation and the experience of being an outsider. Links between the viewer, subject, and artistic process create a dramatic, immersive experience in my installations which explore the terror of an alienated reality, whether real or perceived. I use techniques of observation, magnification, and exaggeration to confront the absurdity of life – the object of my satirical intent.

 

The environments I have constructed incorporates fabricated objects, assemblage sculpture, and video projection to dramatize the relationship between past and present. I seek to show how the past persists and insists in our present, and how the present can be seen to influence the past.  Gaming in this way with the arrow of time allows me to create a heightened reality, at once strange and familiar, a distorted mirror in which we nevertheless recognize ourselves. 

 

Recently, my work has found me researching the phenomenon of hysteria, a diagnosis that has forced many women into insane asylums. My work examines, as well as questions, the thinking that normalized the incarceration of emotionally expressive, strong-willed women and explores how the current mental health industry continues to persecute with damaging stigmas and inhumane practices. In my work, I metaphorically establish relationships between barbaric methods of medical treatments of the past and compare and contrast them to contemporary treatments of today.