Mark Rothko said once, “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on… And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.”
This is the driving force behind my body of work. I am interested in this kind of theoretical contract we all sign when we love someone. When you love you do so knowing that one day you will have to grieve that love. Rather that be through death, through break up, or through some other way. It is these powerful emotions that come with grief that are depicted in my sculptures.
I find myself leaning into textures and the abstraction of the figure to convey these emotions. I resonate with contemporary artists such as Gillian Carnegie and Heidi Lau for their evocation of emotion within their work. The surface is rigid and rough. It represents what happens to people when they must endure the longing and suffering that grief brings. The hardening of one’s heart and the barriers we put between us and the living as we try to protect ourselves from more sorrow.
I make them to represent a human, but in reality, they represent the hardly human. It’s what is left of us after carrying such burdens and how we are transformed from pain. In large and bulking masses, they carry a part of my own burdens with grief. This collection work allowed me to explore my own journey with the loss of my father and what has become of me and the people who are left behind to mourn their loved ones.
