My artistic process is deeply influenced by my surroundings; rather than being defined by a particular medium, many of my projects are linked by the platform of re-construction: A concept that draws from all the available resources around us, re-positioned, and very much inspired by the buildings and people living on the islands in the Seto Inland Sea, Japan, where I have also lived. This understanding of the need to form arrangements in relation to what can be freely obtained underscores my practice. This approach is incorporated as a form of inventive improvisation which presents change as a permanent state arising from the chaotic and fragmentary nature of the everyday. These inquiries have led me to explore my own origins and to collaborate with family and friends in a very personal form of research that results in a constant process of learning: About materials, landscape, people, and myself.
Through sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, and photography I reveal a close and constant engagement with the material world, immersing myself in the ongoing re-construction and transformation of personal and collective identities. Using a wide range of collected objects, my approach challenges the traditional conceptions of art making; while my paintings and drawings are marked by a keen depiction of repetition and a strong sense of elapsed time —instilled in me from my early training as a house painter, landscaper and gold digger. Parallel to my artistic production, I have cultivated writing as an investigative tool of self-analysis that merges history, criticism, and fiction. My texts about art, politics, and culture are a layer to be added to my aesthetic practice.
This act of engaging with reality, as real and defined, presents certain possibilities – the problem and the solution, cause and effect, an understanding of the forces of light and dark, constant change. Subsequently, these pieces are contemplative arrangements (of islands; islands within islands) that reflect the lifestyle of living on an island in the Seto Inland Sea, Japan. Human life can be presented through its very absence, and the Japanese notion of ‘mono no aware’ or ‘the pathos of things’ is revealed. I am reflecting on our own individual condition while salvaging, reshaping, reconstructing and revealing the poetic encounter.
