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I know my finger; I know its shape, its scale, I know the tiny rivulets that spiral on its surface.  Yet when my finger touches something hot or cold or rough or smooth, the world that is my finger expands as I absorb information about these other surfaces.  Despite the layers of skin that separate the cavities of my body from the outside world, these perceptions seep through. Language, a seemingly objective form of communication, is often used to describe a universalized notion of what a healthy human body should be.  However, one’s body can never be anything but subjective.  Everyone experiences the world differently and sensations can seem beyond verbal communication.  How often does one encounter a feeling that words can’t describe?  Art is the medium through which I attempt to communicate these emotions and find a way to accept the unique human form that I, as well as all other beings, inhabit.

Drawing is the core of my practice because it holds the residue of an artist’s movements.  Judy Pfaff, an instillation artist who creates elaborate, multi-room environments, finds a basis for her work in drawing as well.  In 2009 Pfaff’s Paper exhibitionshowcased a number of large scale relief drawings.  She places a great deal of emphasis on the types of papers and processes she uses.  Her handmade and tactically engaging surfaces are burnt, covered in encaustic and layered over each other to create a rich and deep visual field.  My own drawings are also built up surfaces that rely on the intrinsic qualities of the material in order to create a visceral experience for viewers.  Pfaff expresses that, “In a funny way, drawing teaches me how to move my hands because the drawings are actually quite physical.  They’re cut pieces of paper, or burnt pieces of paper, or stuff stuck on—collages. But they’re very important.”   Drawing, for me, is not simply putting material to a flat surface – it a manner of bodily engaging with my work.  I must get up and move around the piece, using not only a pencil but often scissors, a glue gun, and a paint brush.

I call my process “drawing in space” because I use linear gesture whether I am putting charcoal to paper or looping wires.  Pfaff mirrors my manner of extending drawing away from flat surfaces in work such as 2003’s multi-room installation, Neither Here Nor There.  The work spans four separate rooms and includes mechanical tubing, wood, foam, paint, and tape to create an all-inclusive sensation.  Pfaff painted rigid patterns on the wall, but she then continued these patterns out into the center of the rooms in the form of thin sculptures.  My wire constructions are meant to create a sense of volume while still echoing the linear mark-making of drawing.  The enormous yet very empty forms Pfaff pieces together also serve to create the impression that her drawings have grown out of the wall into substantial forms.  Her work is full of tension.  Pfaff makes, “…sculpture which [is] light, transparent, and illusionistic, sculpture which you couldn’t take home and put in your living room, sculpture which had an open-ended aspect…”   I use a similar sense of unease between mass and void, order and chaos and rigid and organic in order to force my audience to be aware of their own bodies in relation to the work I create.

Pfaff is an influence for the way I formally construct spaces, but the content of her work is separate from mine.  I very intentionally use the inside of the mouth, the ridges of the spine, and the tips of toes as representatives of the most sensitive elements of the human form, where exaggerated experience is most present.  By forcing the extension of these tactile anatomical elements, through abstract three-dimensional constructs, I want viewers to feel the pressure behind the forms and perhaps find shells in which they can see themselves.  Anthony Gormley is a sculptor who creates work that asks questions about, “the edge between definitions; the place where surface begins or ends, since that place is one and the same; the line of division between mapping and real existence.”    In 2003, he exhibited a series called Feeling Material, consisting of a number of spiraling forms created out of loops of rolled mild steel wire.  Gormley always begins his work with a human body, normally his own.  For this series, he created very vague and simplistic outlines and then surrounded them with a storm of outwardly extending wires.  There is a sense of both representation and abstraction as Gormley tries to visually create an image of experience and its extension beyond the boundaries of our bodies, ““…when we feel the cavities of our own body…we have an entirely different scale.”   The sprawling wires that extend from my work are a similar attempt to show sensations that cannot be visually seen on the surface of the body.

Gormley’s work is also founded in drawing.  His 1996 piece, Touch, shows two hands reaching out towards the edges of the paper.  Gormley sees the paper he uses as a kind of porous skin that pigments can seep into and through.  He states, “'Drawing is a half-way house between the materiality of sculpture and the mentality of imagination.”   I incorporate naturalistic illustrations as part of my own work because they are a way of sketching out how I visually interpret the world.  I want to capture the evocative qualities of skin and flesh by drawing details such as wrinkles and furrows that suggest small motions and experiences that can be lost when form is abstracted.  However, I recognize that my drawings are one of many degrees of separation from actual sensation, especially since I mediate reality through photography first.  I extend my drawings with materials that suggest a highly charged tactile sensation and actually intrude into the audience’s space to allow viewers the intimacy of first-hand experience rather than the separation caused by my particular style of drawing the body.

Materials inform the content of my work – I rely on translucent fabrics, plastics, and adhesives because they both disclose and conceal, much like our permeable skin.  The fragile materials change depending on the environment.  I seek delicacy because I want to force recognition of how susceptible our bodies are to damage but also how lovely they are due to their transformations.

The materials I use and the way I use them is greatly influenced by post-minimalist process artists such as Eva Hesse.  Once again, Hesse is an artist that creates both drawings and sculptures, finding the quality of linear gesture essential to the forms she creates and the way that she moves viewers through space.  1965’s Ringaround Arosie incorporates many of the motifs that defined much of Hesse’s relief drawings including a paper mâchéd plane covered in expanding circles of rope.  Catherine De Zegher explains that, “drawing is an outward gesture that links our inner impulses and thoughts to the other through the touching of an inscriptive surface with repeated graphic marks.”   Thus, drawing evokes a sense of the artist and a record of their own sensations in making the work.  The nearly obsessive repetition of circular forms and spirals that is present in Hesse’s work is for me a symbol of the constricting emotion of anxiety and displacement that comes from separating our own bodies, selves, and experiences from what we deem to be the norm.  I value Hesse’s ability to transform seemingly inconsequential materials into emotional artistic statements.  I seek in my own work to take mundane materials – plastic sheeting, hemp, and tape – and elevate them into visceral structures.

 Hesse’s, like myself, uses highly industrial and synthetic materials.  Substances such as latex, plastic, and glue contribute to the content of my work since they are indicative of the very synthetic materials we attempt to cover ourselves in to stem off decay.  They are our replacement skins.  By burning and ripping and destroying these materials, I want to remind viewers that they are permeable, just as our own bodies are. 

In 1969, Hesse produced a piece titled Right After which consisted of fiberglass, polyester resin, wire.  The initial response to the piece is related to the sense of heaviness it evokes, despite the fact that the material is so light.  Rosalind Krauss analyses Hesse’s work as, “specificity on the edge between the pictorial and sculptural.”   This description is extremely apt for Hesse’s string pieces for the fact that they can appear to be drawings on the wall from particular angles, but these linear gestures then enter into the three-dimensional realm as viewers navigate around and below the piece.  I seek this same tension and unease in my own work between what is illusion and what is reality, and how this shift can change a person’s own experience in space.  Pollock describes Hesse as, “playing-off of contradictions, her dialectics of pictorial versus sculptural space, of something and nothing, of absence and presence, of fixed versus fluid….the kind of negation that it performs.”   Hesse did not give answers, but set up questions through her work that require the participation of the viewer.  The work is not easy – viewers are expected to have to physically and emotionally engage with structures that seem precarious and disturbing in order to find their own bodily relation to the space.  I ask for this same persistence from viewers in my work as they attempt to follow the flow and movement of line and shape through two-dimensional and three-dimensional space.  I want to create work that speaks about the body by using an experiential language.  Additionally, Hesse incorporated another dimension into her work – that of time.  Outside of the fragility of the work itself, the materials she utilized rapidly decay over time to the point where much of it cannot be displayed today.  This ephemerally is also present in my work, where viewers can sense the delicacy of the piece and can see the reflection of the body’s own impermanence.

Most pieces contain elements appropriated from a former work.  Often, this involves violently ripping a material free from its former container.  I then integrate the material into a new project.  This destruction and re-creation represents how our bodies are constantly forming, dying and then forming anew.  While our image may remain constant on the outside, every skin cell dies and is replaced once every seven years.  Thus, becoming attached to the body as it is now and trying desperately to keep it from evolving into something new is a futile attempt. 

My pieces are a record of the human condition of entropy.  The processes I use are a reflection of my desire to embrace bodily deterioration, such as scars, bruises, sagging skin, and broken nails, as a reminder of who I am, where I’ve been and the sensations I’ve collected along the way.  I want to find a way to put myself back into my own skin instead of being caught in some notion of an idealized form.  Skin, both protective and vulnerable, is my motif because it is, at the most basic level, the porous bridge that provides a gateway between my internal experience and my relationship with the rest of the world.