Growing up, I lived on an old sheep farm. Our driveway section had a rickety garage that never housed any cars because it was constantly filled with unwanted junk that my parents hoarded for special projects like an old band saw, rusty nails and washers, tarps, plastic bags filled with strange metal odds and ends for craft projects, and other miscellaneous items.This shed was an integral part of where I fashioned my toys as a young girl and where I was truly able to develop a mature sense of creativity and imagination.

The act of collecting is something that I have cultivated from my personal history: found objects carry a certain residue of their past and that is extremely tantalizing to me as an artist. I crave the connection between myself and their past lives, worldly issues around me, the past and present lives of people, and the materiality of things. Through my collecting, I am able to feel empathy for the object, everyone the object has touched, and everything the object has seen. Through that transfer of energy, I am taken on a journey through time and space, a journey that allows me to be the object’s eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and touch: I am the objects’ senses.

In my installation Pollen to Politicians, I hope to propel the audience into the realm of social justice by creating a comfortable space to digest harsh realities and to provide the resources to do something about those harsh realities. By using found objects in my works, I am able to invite the audience into our shared reality but, after enticing the audience member with  recognizable and safe symbols, I trap them by confronting them with tough issues like the destruction of honey bees, who produce ⅓ of the food we eat in this country, and the mistreatment of women on a variety of levels that need to be faced in this country and have been ignored for so long. Thus, ecofeminism provides the comfort of normality with the whirlwind sitting down and communicating with strangers about the topics that my artworks inspire.

Ecofeminism is the theory that the reason we treat women poorly is because we treat the environment poorly. Ecofeminism plays an integral part in understanding both environmental ethics as well as human rights issues by analyzing the relationship between patriarchal dominance over the intersectionality that comes with feminism and the vast destruction of the planet's’ ecosystem, environment, and nature in general. Ecofeminism is key in being able to make intelligent connections between gender roles and the mistreatment of the Earth’s resources but most importantly, ecofeminism is a call for environmental justice (environmental justice being defined here as the need for every human being to have a safe and healthy environment to live in).

Inspired by the disposability of the art of the revolutionary post war Dadaists, the performative aspects of Contemporary art movements and social justice movements, and the resurrection of the stream of consciousness and dreamy state of the Surrealists, my artwork captures what it’s like to experience beauty, gratitude, stress, sacrifice, strength, resilience, and vibrancy through the thoughts of a passionate feminist who is in love with questioning everything this universe has to offer.

#SaveTheBeesEmpowerWomen