I Can Only Imagine

As a queer artist, I am interested in the role gender and sport plays in gaining a sense of strength, power and control. As an artist I ask: What does my strength, power and sense of control look like? 

By making mixed media ceramic sculptures that incorporate discarded baseballs, I actively deconstruct and rebuild an object of male play. I make these my own and by doing so, take control of what I cannot control. I see this work as being initially sinister, as I violently rip and bust open  balls made of bound leather, holding layers of wrapped string, holding a small pink rubber ball. While physically processing these balls, I contemporaneously process my negative experiences inherently linked to the material. When I have processed this material, I then start to create convoluted abstractions. I hope that these sculptures hold a sense of tension and eroticism, as I insert my own sensibility into an object that is not mine. 

In my two-dimensional work: I make graphite drawings that incorporate textured rubbings of corporal brick forms emerging from the earth. Hard and impenetrable and intimate. I build  images of fortification that cannot be penetrated or whose holes are so dark and vacuous that you are invited into an unknown landscape. I think of my drawings as outlines to create new realities of gender ambiguous forms that are strong. I continue to work on projecting my interiority onto the page and  see my work as an attempt to dismantle, using abstraction as a way to create undefined beautiful things.