Could you describe your practice?
My practice is the best way I’ve found so far for me to try and understand the nature of being
There seems to be a wide range of material within your work, from handmade pieces to found. Could you talk a bit about the specific mediums you find yourself working with and how you gather materials?
I tend to gather materials for the paintings off of their presence. Usually amounting in different piles of materials that have a similar resonance and once a certain understanding of one another happens they get put together with the hopes of taking all these different objects and making them feel like a single object once my part is done.
How did your interest in art begin?
I’m not sure if I ever really had a singular moment when the interest in art began. It seems that questions have always been present and making work helps answer those questions in some way.
What/who is influencing your work right now?
There is an old cottonwood tree in my driveway that is in the final stages of life and is going to fall any day now. I think about and look at it a lot.
Describe your current studio or workspace. (Please provide a photo of it if you have one)
In the warmer months I usually work outside in front of the barn just in the driveway, then in the winter I work in the tack room of the barn because it’s heated.
There is a strong sense of embellishment throughout your work that calls back to many tropes found in folk art (i’m thinking about the fence at Howard Finster’s paradise garden, memory jugs, grottos etc.). Can you talk about the correlation between this and your work if any?
The embellishment in the work comes as a side effect of maybe the most labor intensive part of the process for me and that’s removing myself from the work. In some ways proving to this wisdom beyond our reality that what you’re doing is not about the self and about all. You have to show that force that you care and it’s safe for it to materialize as an object in this place.
On top of heavy embellishment, the objects and images you choose to arrange in your pieces feel highly specific, all with a linking in some way to the natural — birds, sticks, stones, leaves and so on. Can you talk a bit about what these symbols and objects hold for you and the through lines they create within your work?
Seeing myself as more of a mesh for this presence to flow through that creates a painting is where a lot of the symbols sets come from. My mesh is woven a certain way I suppose, from past lives and this one resulting in the symbols that come out of that mesh. The objects that end up being used in the works just always seem to have a similar presence to them that I can’t quite articulate with words and can really only be felt. It seems counter to the work maybe, but I really want to give these objects justice by aligning them in such a way that the works feel quiet and timeless in a way like they’ve always been here in this form.
What are the main motifs and themes present within your work?
I really appreciate the relentless humbling nature provides and its ability to be observed however micro or macro you can manage to imagine. Having the motif present in the smallest detail of the work and the larger more obvious symbols as well.
What is one of the bigger challenges you and/or other makers are struggling with these days and how do you see it developing?
A lot of the culture around art has this disillusion that things come out of a vacuum and the market doesn’t allow artist to find their place. Everything has to be viable instantly. You can’t summon the true presence of art with money, but you sure can fake it really well. Art lives in this world of it own that is both subjective and objective and its hard to understand that I think.
What are some recent, upcoming or current projects you are working on?
I’m currently in a three person group show at Andrew Edlin gallery in New York
What do you want a viewer to walk away with after seeing your work?
If the viewer could walk away or stand in the presence of the work and feel a sense of vast commonality and maybe a reassurance of place in this big cycle of being, then I think I’ve done a good job in part of the process.
Collage is commonly thought of in 2-d paper form but the term encapsulates so much more. How do you interpret what a collage is and how do you use collage within your practice to bring together a wide array of objects and images?
I’ve always been fascinated with infinite regress and I think collage embodies that pretty well. All the works I’ve ever made are one work really just different layers sliced off to be examined. But truly to be whole you’d have to stack every work that I’ve made on top of one another making one giant super deep painting that you could never really see the beginning of.
Do you have any daily rituals?
Pretty generically probably making coffee in the morning. Making sure to observe how the environment around me is gradually changing is something I try and be aware of everyday as well.
What do you collect?
Thankfully I found an outlet for my obsessive collecting habits with making work and everything can go into them. But I collect bits of glass or other little pieces of detritus that I find, rocks, sticks, pennies really anything that I like being around and feel a kinship with.
What have you been listening to/reading lately?
I just re read Dan Flores new book Wild New World and The Embodied Mind by Thomas Verny
Interview conducted and edited by Lily Szymanski. All images courtesy of the artist.