To put things very simply, this work is about my body and my mind; the two things I have complete autonomy over; the two constants in the current cusp of college and adulthood that I find myself in. Rather than making a concrete statement, this work illustrates my stream of consciousness, which is much to do in part of the experimental nature of my creative process. I am drawn to cut and paste collage above all other mediums because it allows for a very meditative creative experience. We
live in such a visual world where images carry so much weight and meaning. To create my collages I somewhat mindlessly collect images that speak to me, only to destroy them, pair them, paint over them, and layer them to create entirely new imagery. While I rarely sit down with an intention of what I want my work to convey, I find when looking back my work tends to reflect my headspace and my world at the time that I created it. I see traces of books that I have read and loved, late night conversations with friends over beers when we should have been studying, color combinations from long-time favorite and over-worn outfits. I see reflections of my tendencies of loneliness and over-pensiveness, gained love and lost love, feelings of being looked at, assessed, and judged. I see manifestations of albums I’ve listened to on repeat, people I have loved, movies I have watched, places I have
been. These tiny personal narratives reminiscent to me in my work obviously mean nothing to the viewer, because I’m the only person who really knows what goes on in my head. While many of my pieces are tied together with visual themes of sexuality, femininity, human body parts, and nature, I intend for this work to have a sense of ambiguity and obscurity. Take whatever meaning you find in it, even if that is no meaning at all.
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My work is also very related to human drives. I think that all creative people have a need to create things; a drive as strong as hunger, sex, and love. We all have boundaries up because of fear of judgement and failure. Letting go of the inhibitions and fear that keep these drives at bay allows me to frivolously and gluttonously create with no boundaries. To exercise this trope of creativity is to be a little more primitive, human, and vulnerable than the rest of the world. Like other human drives, creating can be a means of survival, but it can also be pleasure seeking. My creative process is both. Instead of displaying work with the intention to sell something or make some sort of grand universal statement, I wanted to use this opportunity to create art that felt like an accurate representation of the way my mind looks to me. The only way I can describe my preferred method of creating is free-flow. This work is anti-planning, pro-doing. Anti-machine, pro-mess. Anti-ego, pro-id.
This work is my compulsiveness to create things with my hands. This work is my need to silence my late-night thoughts in an empty campus studio by surveying over images, ripping up vintage Playboy magazines and thrift-store nature books, layering colors and forms, bodies and mountains, killing five glue sticks per night. This work is my love of creating, experimenting with different mediums, making five things that I hate for every one thing that I am happy with. This work is inspired by Dadaism, 1960's psychedelia, and early punk rock album cover art. This work is kinda graphic design, kinda fine art, kinda neither. As a designer, I am accustomed to creating things with other people's wants and needs in mind, but as an artist I hope to selfishly create things that feel exclusively me.
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Work
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