For me making art is a way to celebrate mystery, a way to embrace the un-measurable, to encounter different ways of thinking and being, to challenge myself and others, to loosen/defy perceived, established definitions. And of course, I make art to express myself, to ask questions, to say something. My artworks have something very real at their core: No matter how edited, constructed/altered the final works may be; the source, the starting point, the genesis, is always rooted in lived experience.
Although my work is placed within a fine-art context, positioned within academic research culture, I do not feel that the work is restricted to those environments, to those debates alone. It is of the utmost importance to me that my work does not operate exclusively within those realms, solely for those audiences. I try to create work that seeks to encompass wider spheres of cultural reference, and therefore, to have broad impact.
My work adopts some of the strategies (specifically recorded audio interviews) used by journalists, oral historians, anthropologists, criminologists, social-scientists and other academics. Combining that approach with the literary device of creative non-fiction enables me to expand and invent: Interviews are recorded, edited, transcribed into text, then re-edited to form a script. This activity creates narrative through a reversal of the conventional script-writing process. Ideas emerge through editing the interviews, providing a direction for the narratives to take, in defiance of their chronology and context.
Throughout my undergraduate degree, I worked full-time as a Human Service Worker at Montgomery County Emergency Service (MCES) a 39- bed, emergency, locked psychiatric unit in Norristown, Pennsylvania, USA. MCES is a mixed gender unit, serving local jails, prisons, police stations, hospitals and schools, in addition to the entire community of Montgomery County. My responsibilities included attending to patient’s needs on the unit, supporting nursing/medical staff, and working with the ambulance crew responding to mental health emergencies out in the community at large. To this day, I maintain a high level of interest in ideas around our collective and individual social responsibilities inspire my work and continue to motivate me as an artist. My work often addresses difficult topics, difficult experiences. Yet, the ideas are presented respectfully, sensitively, directly; deploying humor, beauty, and both narrative and visual invention. The research and resulting artworks always engage with participants and archives in a considerate and appropriate manner. Informed consent is essential to the production of these projects. Ultimately, my artworks are a hybrid form of expanded, experimental portraiture: portraits of people, of places, of things and ideas.
