I use natural forms as a metaphor for human experience. Nature forms and transforms through external and internal stimuli much like the way human personality traits and emotional identity form through our daily encounters with hardship and blessing. Similar to the way nature needs external stimuli and internal reactions to transform into its intended final form, humans also need this action to reaction process to form beliefs, values, character, and identity.
Many of the seemingly insignificant occurrences in our lives can have significantly powerful effects on the formative processes that lead to the eventual outcome of our psyche. We often do not realize or understand the effects these stimuli have had upon our psyche until they have already taken hold. Life cycles in nature are similar to human psychological and physiological development. Think of a seed as a specific stimuli and the interpretation and evaluation of how we let that stimuli change us. Bundle that seed together with thousands of others and you will have a forest that makes up the whole of our experience which informs who we are.
My work is intended to make the viewer question their own experience. By using natural forms that seem familiar to most, but strangely different, I hope the viewer will question what their own reality is and whether or not their experience is true. Humans have a simultaneously wonderful and terrible ability to lie to themselves. We often will remember things differently than they actually happened. That being said, most of my work addresses a personal experience and the struggle I have with what actually occurred. Each work is an expression of emotion, memory, or experience that I have had in my own life. For example, my sculpture Faith is the physical form of a childhood memory. I grew up attending a church that had several large maple trees around its parking lot. While I may not remember much about the service, or what I was supposed to learn from going to church, I do remember going out after the service with other children and playing in the piles of “helicopters” that had fallen from the trees.