Disparities and Deformations Sculpture

Artist Statement The visceral disquietude of the inner body informs my artistic practice. Boundless in function, the body's internal milieu presents the continual processes of growth and decomposition. The interstitial language of beauty in the grotesque presents itself in this place of anomalous form and ambivalent emotion. In my fantastical vision of the interior body, abstracted and hybridized forms pose a disobedience to classification systems that stereotype the normal or ideal. Conceptually, this synthesis and derangement of bodily parts, made alien, parallels my own wonder and fear of the body. Through materiality and installation, I explore dream-like bodily environments that investigate my understanding of how beauty can intermingle with the grotesque. Biomorphic forms that grow up from the floor, ooze down the wall, dangle overhead, visually and viscerally immerse viewers. Large and small passageways allow the viewer to physically move through, brush against and intimately inspect areas more closely. Functioning as orifices, these corridors conflate my identification of self within the confines of a larger entity. Under skin-like layers of translucent, stretchy rubbers and fabrics, forms protrude, pull away, or bury themselves alluding to cycles of growth and partial deaths. Glistening, translucent resins and the pus-like ooze of waxes mimic the stickiness and serous quality of inner bodily fluids. Ragged, dipped and dried crimson fibers are tissue-like in structure and in their resemblance to flesh, rendered grotesquely dark. By providing moments of shuffled familiarities within the duality of discomfort and comfort, I push viewer's perceptions of the unseen body. Imagined fragile inner realms function as metaphor for a future I see as in flux. Embracing ideological possibilities of biotechnology and genetic engineering, I am interested in the viewer thinking about the notion of a hybrid self and a self in many states of transformation and demise. Organ, tissue and fluid-like forms hint at recognizable origins, yet find inexplicable relationships to other innards through physical connections that lie in varying states of development and degradation. Allusions to normal bodily functions blur. Boundaries are negotiated between the grotesque and the beautiful through closer inspection and contemplation.