Over the last decade or so I have worked with steel, glass, marble, dirt, weeds, insects, bacteria, seeds, flour, gold leaf foil, fabric and old books. I work out of respect for each material’s inherent integrity and a passion for creating beautiful objects and experiences. Every material projects its own spectrum of unique sensory triggers. If I’m sensitive enough in choosing what to put next to what, a moment will arrive when the collective story starts telling itself. The materials themselves contain no image, no representation, no story, but they create all these things in me. The information I gather from this process formulates new ideas and sometimes leads me through a conduit to something unexpected.

How and why does all this work? How do ordinary things outside my body have such a powerful impact on the inside of my body? What are the neural mechanisms that connect whatever dots are available into some string of meaning. I don’t know, but the answer lies somewhere in the code that controls human perception and every one of my works is an attempt to crack it. My career to date is one long research project on this subject and each new work is another experiment. Because I’ve logged a lifetime of powerful associations with these raw and everyday things, my mind starts writing their story before my hand does. Much of my work begins with considering the possible things a material can say when configured in different contexts or patterns.

I see all materials as speaking their own language. To create the work Trace Elements, I sifted 80 pounds of white flour into thousands of small piles on the gallery’s floor. Because we all have so many associations with flour’s physicality and material history, its language is one we understand right away. For me, both the experience of the installation and the final result alluded to the powerful impermanence of a Tibetan sand mandala.

This theme of framing familiar materials in an unfamiliar context and then letting them evolve through their merged lifecycle appears in many of my works that combine living organic material with vulnerable human-created objects. The visual component that we might think of as permanent – the book – is quickly overtaken and consumed by the stronger organic environment. I am fascinated by the pace and rate of the takeover, and by the patterns and atmospheric effects that form during the time it takes for nature to reclaim the book’s organic components.

My own existence and whatever personal or artistic philosophy I might form is embedded in this same cycle whether I’m aware of it or not. Working in this realm helps me remain aware of nature’s relentless progression through the cycle of life, death, and regeneration, and I hope that my works serve to share some of this revelation.