Artist Statement

I am an American multimedia sculptor living and working between Morgantown, WV; Baltimore, MD; and Detroit, MI. My practice examines and reimagines relationships to materials shaped by extractive industries, investigating how these materials function beyond their economic roles. Through research into their histories, material properties, and the environmental and social impacts of their extraction, I seek to reframe how such substances are perceived and understood.

Working between intuitive and analytical approaches, my sculptures oscillate between evoking sensation and constructing legibility, drawing on sources that range from personal memory to complex data sets. I approach sculpture as a process-based dialogue, engaging materials as active participants. This ongoing exchange challenges assumptions of inanimacy, allowing the work to mirror and reanimate the realities it references.

While my practice spans a wide range of media, a consistent throughline lies in engaging with materials that I am conceptually reimagining. Recently, I have focused on coal: carving it, using its dust as pigment, and arranging it into structured compositions. My initial interest in coal is rooted in lived experience, having grown up adjacent to a coal-fired power plant and later on reclaimed coal mining land. These experiences informed an evolving inquiry into how the material carries both personal and collective histories, the impact of our colonial relationship to it, and how recontextualizing coal within reality can heal the unsustainable and dysfunctional relationship we have with the Earth.

By tracing the complex networks surrounding coal, my work resists a singular narrative of value and utility. Instead, it proposes a recontextualization of extractive materials as a means of addressing and potentially repairing the fractured relationships between humans and the natural world.