Statement

Not to harp on and on about the pandemic, but COVID changed the way I made art. Solitude did little to help my practice, nor did the time the lockdown granted me. What changed my work was the overwhelming sense of dread. The world seemed to be ending, and my art, which had previously been serious and idealistically righteous, seemed like less of a hill I wanted to die on. Since my death was fast approaching, I had better pick a hill that was enjoyable to lie on or at least a hill that could give me some joy. Like the Dadaists, my response to tragedy drove me into humor and absurdity. This is not a perfect comparison because the Dadaists were victims of a world war, and I was just sad in my mother’s basement in Wisconsin. But still, our response to tragedy was the same.

Humor is hard on its own, but humor in ceramics is especially difficult. It's hard to create comedic timing with a stationary object made of hardened dirt. Being a masochist, which most craft artists are, I thought I would add an additional element of extremely specific nostalgic references. Nostalgia is specific and will only gut-punch a person with a sense of re-remembering if they know the reference. A perfume bottle from a commercial ten years ago only gives a person that rare feeling of “unlocking” forgotten memory because they have seen it before. The wider the audience I can create, the more individuals I will be able to gift this feeling to.

My work, if anything, is a history of nonessential personal influences. These influences--mainly magazines, crafts, reality television, commercials, parental advice, and analog technology--all had an intangible impact on the type of person I would develop into 10-ish years later. I have always been nostalgic, and going through the weird cabinets of references circling around in my mind drives me to create objects. Not because they were hugely impactful but because they were minorly impactful in ways I am still discovering. Subconsciously paramount but consciously negligible. They are important enough for me to remember vividly ten-odd years later, so their effect is much like a song stuck in your head: It’s annoying but obviously engrained in the psyche. I can make all the art in the world about grand influences in my life like my parent’s divorce, various heartbreaking relationships, and my discovery of two-part epoxy, but their force and effect on my personality and behavior are apparent. I am more interested in the earworm influences or the unobvious baggage I carry. Stuff that gets stuck into my brain like burrs that stick to your pant legs. Sure, the burrs have a plan in place, but as the host of the burrs, I am unaware of their trajectory. They seem stuck to me, so isn’t that important enough to acknowledge?