I’m always surprised by things that appear and reappear in my art.  So sometimes it seems like I have these interests that are deeper, that I don’t really think about, like concepts or themes that keep emerging.  Visual themes.  And they’ve really been there from the beginning–beyond public art, beyond the thread pieces, beyond school.  I could trace some of them back to things I made when I was a kid.

For example, my final architecture studio project in college was a homeless shelter.  And we were supposed to not only design a homeless shelter but also question, what is a homeless shelter?  What makes a homeless shelter different from any other building?  Is it just a hotel, kind of, basically?  An apartment complex that’s called a homeless shelter?  Or is there something fundamentally different about the space?  So I got off on this idea–to me, being homeless was not a settled thing.  And I was interested in people who were actually not wanting to transition immediately into an apartment, and they were kind of comfortable in this transient situation.  I was interested in the in-between. 

So I ended up imagining this forest-like space, where there was this field of columns.  And basically for the kind of non-permanent housing part of my project, people could come into this space and set up their own area using these columns as space delineators.  So it’s like if you went into a forest, you set up camp, basically, rather than a prescribed room.  I had those too, but that was on a different level, literally.  

But that idea of a spatial field, with depth, the columns–that’s come into the work a lot.  It’s come into Prairie Roots, it’s come into Close, Closer, Closest.

There’s also the concept of being able to arrange it differently. That would be definitely another theme–to create a framework, to design the frame or the structure where things happen, and to leave that alone. Filling the Void and Connections Gallery do this. 

And also, Stacks is in a way like that. It’s a rigid frame, and the pages on it that have printing on them are meant to be changed. So it’s kind of the same.

That’s probably the architecture background.  You design a building where life happens in the building, right?  You don’t design the life. You don’t dictate that.  You design something that can accommodate it. It’s a framework.

close closer closest, Connections Gallery, filling the void, prairie roots, Stacks