Phenomenological Constructions

These installations examined the sharing of lived experience through aesthetic collections, sensory cognitions and embodied memories of place and time. Here I aim to affect sensitivities thru material layers of collected artifacts and multiple technologies in the site-specific and gallery settings.

Artist Statement

These installation works were related to my pursuit of an MFA degree in Interdisciplinary Arts at a hybrid program at Sierra Nevada College, Incline Village, NV.  The work is spurred by the influence of affective experience. Through a wordless, subjective, aesthetic language I mold layered facets of my experience into tangibility. My subject matter is based in moments of personal experience and the self-awareness of my agency within the natural world around me. My product, like the process from which it stems, is meant to convey a re-recognition or shared sensation of a subtle or momentary shift in mindset or emotional being upon encounter—a collective enlivening.

Drawing on my intrigue with conceptual installation by contemporary artists such as Robert Irwin, Sarah Sze, Jacco Olivier, Tara Donovan, Julianne Swartz, and Olafur Eliasson, my current series of works are motivated by moments— inspiration gained thru moments that stop me in my tracks and alter my emotional state or train of thought in some significant way. My work tends not to directly reference these moments, like in terms of creating a narrative picture. I use the moment as a reference point, an inspirational point of view from which to reflect upon, analyze, process and savor as I work toward creating a new affective experience for others.

Philosophically, I am taking a phenomenological approach; a first person, experiential voice. My muse is the complexity of our world—and our experiences and interaction with that world. The viewer is an important consideration for me, like a guest. I want them to be treated to an experience that is affective in some positive regard.

Since I have been looking to my own experiences for inspiration to create artwork, the subject matter of my work is enriched by my daily routine. For example, I have a farm in Madison County, Alabama and much of my time is concerned with plants and animals. We have two beehives which have been a point of new discoveries and contemplation for me, as I have been learning hands-on about beekeeping and the complexities of the lives of bees. Since bee behavior and my experience with beekeeping is on my mind, references to bees find their way into my work. As do objects from (and references to) the woods in my backyard, the other animals we keep and don’t keep (our resident foxes for example) and

experiences with my preschool daughter. Additional inspirational moments are encountered thru travels and unanticipated encounters.

Installation Samplings

Shade Installation & Sky Tavern Installation

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Abbreviated Trees

Abbreviated Trees is a sculptural installation series built from oak and maple tree trunks and branches that have been sliced, drilled and strung on lines. They hang as plumb lines, gauging depth and verticality in selected locations in the woods where they "abbreviate" the view, contrasting and complimenting their surrounding woodland counterparts.

 Tree Implants

The concept behind Tree Implants is a form of artistic exhibition that doubles as an act of creating a focus of mental and aesthetic energy on an injured or dying tree by adhering to it a sculptural component; a temporary and decorative clay bandage, prosthetic or otherwise, to accentuate and memorialize its existence.

Text-Based Art

In the following installations I have experimented with the use of words as the primary visual and communicative component of the work.

Huntsville Haiku

Huntsville Haiku was a public art proposal I submitted for a mini-grant from the Something Interesting Downtown initiative by Downtown Huntsville, Inc. and PNC Bank. This temporary installation materialized as a collaborative “creative placemaking” artwork of Haiku poetry written by eighth graders at Huntsville’s Mountain Gap (P-8) Elementary School. Haiku is a form of traditional poetry from Japan, elegant and concise in its simplicity, consisting of three lines with a syllable count of 5-7-5 respectively. The students’ poems were thematically inspired by Greater Huntsville. This installation descended/ascended the stairway, from the Huntsville Downtown Square into Big Spring Park, the site of a natural spring historically central to the settlement of Huntsville. The intent of this work was to aesthetically reactivate this symbolic site--from the natural spring from which the community sprang, up to the heart of the city--in order to engage people in re-seeing and reflecting about Huntsville, to spark thought sprung from these children’s inspiring poetic ideas about Greater Huntsville.

See Thru Me

This series of works was created in response to elements of the "pop-up" trend. I chose the phrase to reference a personal distancing (reflecting how I feel about interacting with the public through displaying a conceptual installation as 'my art'); plays on the visual transparency of the letters, the impermanence and purpose of the stencil, and the visible set of loops in the posts; as well as references what we don't want to be seen, chose not to see, no longer see, are forced to look past, and can actually see thru.

Experimental Conceptions

Leaf Boots Series

Leaf Boots were created as a playful gallery piece; integrating repurposed object, fashion and environmentally found objects with conceptual/experiential/installation and photography. The Leaf Boots series references the lived memories of the repurposed rubber boots while the photographic approach attempts to comment on a catalog/advertising imagery approach toward the selling of the invention/art object/concept.