I work as a sculptor, fabricator, and arts organizer and administrator. I am the sole proprietor of anhelo anhelo, a multifaceted project that provides production support to artists, organizes community projects, publishes artist books and anthologies, and uplifts the efforts of other individual artists, creative community practitioners and urban farmers, locally in Detroit and nomadically.
I make poems, castings, vessels and durational installations with biodegradable materials, and organize immersive and cooperative, community-centered public installations. My practice incorporates intimate collaboration, the performative act of public process, writing, and ephemera into its presentation and these are an equal part of the work.
My work is formal, concerned with peace and slowness, it highlights interactions between materials and the ways their environments act upon them. I am concerned with care, tenderness, and loss. With permeability: in the sense of learning, and of the relation of all pieces of life to one another. Everything matters. I am comfortable with exposing the process and labor: an open exchange of information. I use simplicity to denote sincerity, sometimes as easy as a wing nestled within an egg shell, or as laborious as forming a couple thousand pounds of concrete one handful at a time.
The shapes I build have a likeness to their surrounding architecture or landscape, in material, form and texture. They emphasize or make use of the natural movement of water, or wind through the space they take up. I incorporate quotidian materials that are understood easily, and I’m attracted to sticky, stretchy and squishy materials with which I can empathize, bodily.
I consider the totality of material required to make a work, all of the pieces that get thrown away, the tools to build it. The importance of the piece must outweigh the waste it produces. I believe in a generous relationship to authorship when collaborating, opting in my community-centered work for a larger experience built together.