From my artist parents I learned early on that there is visual treasure to be found in everything if you look for it. Gazing at ripples and shadows in the local creek, digging for galena, pyrite, and quartz, hunting for metallic beetles and exquisitely colored moths–this was how I spent my summers. Though I latched hard onto hue and shimmer as a kid, I learned later in working with iron and steel, that it’s the greys, blacks, and browns that make the colors sing. 

My latest works are sculptural collages of steel with added elements of color, plaster, and glass-like chunks of ulexite, a borate mineral. The eerie radiating effects and fracture lines of the ulexite are perfectly suited to convey the concepts I return to again and again: of memory, nostalgia, brokenness, and separation. The fragility and prismatic luminescence of ulexite, set against the heavy, dark metal creates a visual “umami” which I hope lures the viewer into a mind space where images from their own subconscious spontaneously rise to the surface.