Ideas behind my work and the different series
Sculptures
The ceramic sculptures, which I call "LklMkls" (a made-up word meaning "little laughing worlds"), are humorous, imaginary creatures. They carry inhabitants who reside in tiny houses on their backs. LklMkls embody the roles of tricksters, protectors, gigglers, and wish-granters. The silver power cords plugged into their sides transmit life, and their boots allow them to flee from any erupting chaos. Each LklMkl is a unique blend of houses, telephone poles, eyes, mouths, and hands—elements that are not quite human but evoke a sense of wild, joyful worlds containing traces of humanity.
The inspiration for LklMkls came from a desire to bring to life the elements that had been floating in my paintings—eyes, mouths, tiny houses, and telephone poles—barely visible in surreal landscapes. Each sculpture is hand-built from cone 6 ceramic and finished with a mixture of glazes, oxides, and enamels.
Walking Earth Creatures
In these vibrant paintings, I introduce little mouthy creatures who possess strong opinions and a dynamic energy that challenges the chaos around them. Despite being devoid of sight, they bravely embody resilience, firmly holding onto the thread that ties them to their homes. Within the tumultuous landscapes, houses and telephone poles subtly find a place to nestle, as if a celestial shift has disrupted their surroundings, leaving behind a tiny family that clings together and flutters amidst the cosmic upheaval. Through my art, I strive to inspire viewers to tightly grasp onto what truly matters, even when life's turbulence threatens to tear us apart. My creations invite us to find connection in the midst of chaos and to revel in the vibrant vitality that pulses within each of us.
The tiny houses and telephone poles in these paintings are often hidden in a chaotic landscape, where it seems that some cosmic change has just occurred, where the landscape has been been jiggled and this is what’s left - a tiny community held together and fluttering within the terrible and the tender. The stories that accompany these paintings are about the people within these tiny houses
Surreal Landscapes (or an explanation of the telephone poles)
To get there, you follow a passage, not like this sentence is a passage, but instead, like a line is a passage, and you know that the road is there because you can see the houses, and you look up and down the line and see the telephone poles with the telephone lines that snap in some breeze unfelt, at least by you, and listening, you hear the party lines hum with gossip and pig futures.
Do you see the eyes? They’ve been there all this time, just staring at you, as if they’re waiting for their cue, and you think you know what this is all about, that you’ve seen this written down on scraps of paper that were crumbled up and tossed in a trash can, where you repeatedly dug them out and smoothed them on your knee while mumbling to yourself that, really, it’s ok to move on.
Well, the mouth, you understand, it’s just a souvenir, picked up at a Stuckey’s store somewhere in West Texas, where afterwards, you pulled out of the parking lot and back onto the road, snapping your eyes up from the mesmerizing pull of the telephone lines as they stretch from pole to pole, rolling down into the curve and back up, click, and down, then back up, click, keeping time with the purr of the tires on the blacktop, and beyond that you see the flat darkness of the fields, corn rows fanning out in the curve of each line, and before long a house interrupts this flow and you see your own tired eyes reflecting back at you in the glass.
You quickly roll down the window just to feel the cool breeze and you stare straight ahead and somehow you know that this image is just a passage moving through this curious American landscape and that, if you look away now, you might just miss that someway, somehow, here we are.
(This story is a riff I wrote from the opening sentence of All The Kings Men by R.P. Warren)
This new series, Can we talk? began as a summer project where I often explore a new art style or medium. This summer I decided to tackle pop art. I was inspired by the artist Claes Oldenburg (whose sculptures I often pass by in the 14th street subway station in NYC), Takashi Murakami and, to some extent Jeff Koons. Using my many characters and motifs I combined fantasy, surrealism and to some degree- figurative and internal landscapes.
My intent is to show a dialog between my new characters who are designed to be cute yet melancholic. They started as a pen and ink drawing for a new ceramic lachelmachle design and after a request for a commissioned piece based on the drawing, the idea just took off.
Can we talk? is an exploration in conversation and, as often is the case in conversation, these creatures have no mouths (are muted) and they have no ears (not listening) but they are trying to communicate, no matter how flawed they are.
My Adrift series is a collection of surreal ocean landscapes. Attached to the painting is a three-dimensional sculptural object of driftwood that contains HO-scale people, a car and telephone poles. This sculptural object is attached to the linen with magnets. In the sky I’ve painted an apparatus that is part botanical and part mechanical. It floats above the ocean in the sky, and is just out of reach of the humans who are left, floating on the driftwood, where it seems that something might occur, or has already occurred, and now, the consequence is being played out and they are set to repeat the narrative assigned to them.
Often, I say things wrongly- a slip of the tongue, and instead of, did you buy me some blueberries, I say, did the cats get blueberries? Thankfully, linguistic shame keeps me from remembering most slips of the tongue.
Noam Chomsky would argue that each sentence has two levels of representation - a deep structure and a surface structure. The deep structure is the core semantics and is mapped onto the surface structure via transformations. And when we make a slip of the tongue, the deep structure does not translate into the intended surface structure.
In painting, I have a very defined vocabulary and this series explores what I imagine the deep structure might look before the translation into the intended surface structures, so these paintings play with what might be inside, or, what might be a slip of the tongue of the intended meaning of the icons or symbols that I frequently use.