I’ve established an artistic practice rooted in the fundamental human experience. I have a singular passion for creating narratives close to life with a heavy and critical emphasis on sentimental values. Often my work, deals directly with the textures of interpersonal connection, spirituality, loss and care—or the absence thereof—providing an essential, non-traditional avenue for research into how love, as a social and moral force, operates in the contemporary world. My thinking explores deep ethical concerns, not through philosophical argument alone, but through listening, conversation, and play.
As an installation artist, photographer, printmaker and experimental animator, I leverage a manual style of filmmaking that combining hand-drawn sketches and repurposed fabrics, vinyl, and linens into original time-based compositions. I approach my work with a deep fascination in history. Traditions of rhythm, collage, and poetry play a big role in the techniques I employ. What emerges from this process is a combination of electronic, analog, and tactile modes of fabrication. These experimental techniques weave ancient craft traditions with contemporary technology to explore the biological experience.
Sometimes they also incorporate direct film manipulation including scratching, etching, and other kindred avant-garde techniques. Marlon Riggs is a filmmaker who’s proven to be something of a north star for me throughout my career. My latest project is an augmented reality collage and pottery installation called Nothing like a Sonnet that collapses dreamlike family narratives and original compositions into an immersive shadow play. Prominent ideas featured in my recent work reimagine forests and bodies of water as sites of ancestral communion. I think of sound, light, and motion as integrated design components.
As for the here and now, I’m re-reading Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, a novel that continues to astound and fascinate. I’m thinking about what Marvin Gaye did for D’Angelo’s harmonies, Allen Iverson’s cornrow braids, and the rusted Ford pickup truck at my late-grandfather's home in Waverly, Virginia.
