We consistently project the understanding of our bodies onto the environment, the objects, and beings we encounter. The body is a universe in itself--complete with communities, systems, and networks operating together to form a larger whole. These networks extend beyond biology and physiology into the intangible fabric of memory and cognition. However, without bodily awareness as guide, the mind would unravel into disparate threads. As a record of time and experience, the body constantly changes yet is forever situated in the present. The lived body binds our internal and external existence.

My work references the human body and many of its biologic functions by evoking a series of dichotomous relationships between the ‘senses’ and the ‘mind’. My porcelain objects reference interior and exterior; are intimate yet expansive; beautiful yet repulsive. By exposing the secrets of the body the work engages the grotesque and the erotic as they connect our physiological and psychological existence. The aura of purity associated with porcelain allows the viewer to move into and past some of the more graphic and bodily references. My sculptures are created to pique curiosity, elicit touch, and to challenge and question the nature of beauty and our relationship to things unspoken, kept hidden, and private. The scale of my work calls for intimacy. The nuances of the work allow one to become acquainted with an individual piece and to reside within a process of knowing that continues to unfold.

I find porcelain, with its many uses, histories, and connotations, to be an important material with which to give form to my ideas. Porcelain’s translucency and smooth fluidity has an uncanny relationship to skin, which is evident, yet tainted, by the history of porcelain dolls and figurines. This relationship is complicated, because it references the ideal, closed, and pure body. I utilize and challenge the status and aura placed upon this material in order to explore the boundaries separating high and low.

Porcelain also has connections to the infirmed and the scatological, apparent from the history of porcelain medical vessels and lavatory basins. The idea of a material valued so highly being used to dispose of the low, abject, and unclean I find profound. This provides me the opportunity to insert content and reference to the ‘dirty’ parts of the body to subvert the clean and ideal. From its various uses and connotations, porcelain emerges as a multivalent material capable of expanding and collapsing the distance between the beautiful and the grotesque.

By defying the closed ideal body, I insert other fuller ways of representing the body. Emphasizing the body’s orifices and internal cavities, I embody the fluid passage and exchange of inner and outer experiences. This visceral connectivity is the experience of the ‘mind’ and ‘body’ as interconnected with an awareness of presence as perpetual and always becoming.