The starting point is almost always plastic — yogurt containers, protein powder tubs, single-use packaging, styrofoam cups, the wrapping that held something for thirty seconds before being discarded. I collect these objects not as symbols but as facts. Our culture produces plastic in quantities that are genuinely hard to comprehend, and we dispose of it with almost no thought. I want my work to slow that down. To make the throwaway thing worth looking at.
Combined with paper pulp, found objects form the core of my sculptures. The material arrives already carrying something — a prior use, a residue, a shape that was designed for pure convenience and nothing else. I didn't author that history, but I choose to work with it and work against it. The found object inside a sculpture is not decoration. It's an argument. The work is my response.
What draws me to plastic specifically is the gap between how it's treated and what it actually is. It doesn't biodegrade. It doesn't disappear. The cup from the gas station that gets tossed out a window will outlast everything around it. There's a kind of violence in that — quiet, ordinary, and almost entirely invisible because we've agreed not to look at it. Sculpture feels like the right form for making that visible, because objects ask you to be present with them in a way that images don't. You're in the room with it. You have to reckon with it physically.
I'm also interested in what happens to an object when it moves from the waste stream into the work. Something shifts. The thing that was supposed to be invisible gets looked at. The thing that was supposed to be temporary gets fixed in place. That tension — between the disposable and the permanent, the overlooked and the held — is where most of my thinking lives.
What does it mean to make something durable out of the things we made to throw away? I don't have a clean answer. The sculptures are where I work it out.
