I am an artist first, and craft-informed. By this, I mean that I use my skills as a craftsperson to create uncanny works mimicking familiar craft objects, made distinct from their original utilitarian uses. The materials in my work - metal, wood, textile, and broomcorn - represent the skills I have acquired over time learning to make a variety of different objects. 

My work calls attention to the intersection of objects of labor and objects of spirituality. It is no surprise that it was tools of the home and the earth that became associated with witchery and rebellion. They were weapons of the unheard, of those systematically denied autonomy and wealth by a ruling patriarchal class. Today, these handmade tools are fetish objects animated by romantic notions and false memories of history. They assume new forms as bourgeois decorative elements or emblems of a perceived authenticity. In today’s culture, the anachronism is marketable. After all, if you put the word “craft” before or after a word it somehow becomes magical. One just needs to look at the prevalence of the word in advertisements for beer and specialty cars to see this..

A key part of the definition of what is a traditional craft is historicism. It is the passing down of knowledge, a lineage of techniques from one maker to another that makes craft what it is. I have experienced this dissemination of craft knowledge to uphold a particularly limiting standard of beauty, inaccessibility. This pedagogical model shows off the “old ways” as somehow purer, leaning into the esoteric nature of a practice. I have also experienced traditional craft teachings in ways that recognize the humanist qualities of the media, in the interest of community, ecological stability, and social criticism. I am more interested in the latter. 

I question held binaries of many kinds - including art vs. craft, the precious vs. quotidian, and pomp vs shame. I am interested in learning traditional craft techniques and origins so that I may aid in their preservation and teach honest histories. I enjoy finding ways to subvert tradition to comment on the history of craft in this country, along with investigating my own role as a queer artist, writer, jeweler, and broomsquire. Much like my works - neither totally art nor totally craft - sometimes I as a person am one thing, and at other times another.