If you ask me what type of artist I am, I would say I am like a genetic engineer. I am someone who creates new species of objects through hybridization. I collect forms from objects and things that nature or man has designed to perform specific functions or to thrive in extreme environments. Taking inspiration from a culture of innovation and design, I distill shapes from common and uncommon forms and fuse them into objects that I assign a purpose. I use this process of hybridization to reflect the hybrid nature of personal identities and heredity in the United States.

My process begins by creating sculptural drawings where I remember objects and critters that I have encountered in life. Some of my primary sources are: decorative ceilings, luxury vacuum cleaners, deep-sea mollusks, colonizing microbes, fossils, and utilitarian objects from a popular Swedish furniture company.

Through the process of drawing, I begin to imagine what the forms as objects would look like hybridized. I liken this process to home-juicing or making smoothies when you would raid your refrigerator and pantry for ingredients to blend, except I would also dip my hand into a fish tank, pick fleas off the dog, cut off a piece from the vacuum cleaner, and maybe toss in a car headlight for good measure just to see what it would taste like. I make formal aesthetic decisions in the sculpting process and scrutinize the final object till I feel that it’s balanced or adheres to some symmetry rule I’ve intended on the spot.
Then, through a process I call Objective Adaptation, I experiment with real world applications and assign a purpose to my objects that I think would allow them to best alter a domestic or everyday space. The Objective Adaptation phase includes material experimentation in which the material’s formal qualities and their affect on environments takes precedent over assigned purpose, though in many cases the material nature of the object compliments the assigned purpose.

I use a process of sculpting, molding, and casting to make the objects. Having a mold to make objects with aids in the material experimentation during Objective Adaptation and also allows me to produce many objects. During the production process I use molds past their life. A mold has a certain number of castings that it can produce before it deigns to degrade and affect the objects its molding. Instead of destroying my molds after they’ve passed their lifespan, I use the degradation of the mold to accentuate my process. The degradation of the mold results in forms that mutate through production. If I get a particularly good mutation, a mutation that I think adds to the aesthetic of the object and also its assigned purpose, I then make a mold of that shape which, through production, will mutate differently from the original mold. This results in generations of objects present in the same installation that work together in their assigned purpose.

I liken my hybridized objects to the heredity of people in the United States. Many people in the United States ascribe to an immigrant identity that has adapted to the New World and hybridized with other global people and cultures. This adaptation and hybridization of a people has resulted in a unique and distinct cultural identity. This conglomerate of identities results in tensions between different groups and subcultures. This allows for beautiful dialogue between constituent parts that work together in community in the same way the sometimes-disparate sources I draw from work together to create beautiful holistic objects.