Artist Statement

Our urban environments are built of glass, steel, and concrete so thoroughly and consistently that these materials often fade into the background. We pass through them constantly, entirely reliant on their omnipresence, but rarely notice them. I choose to center these materials because I want to have a more thoughtful relationship with the surfaces of my everyday world. I live in a city of steel bridges, glass towers, and concrete vistas, and so I am compelled to engage with the actual material reality of the world around me.

These materials, so ordinary that they become invisible, also carry the capacity to distort, to reflect, to mislead. When people encounter my work, they often describe a moment of spatial disorientation. Lines break, planes shift, reflections trick the eye. A form seen from one vantage point disappears from another. Pieces appear solid until you move, and then they fracture or vanish. I build sculptures that deliberately resist fixed understanding. The act of viewing causes these structures to reorganize themselves. They won’t hold still. They’re made to be seen in motion, and to confuse.

This perceptual confusion and visual instability reflects a deeper disorientation that I experience in myself. I often feel fragmented, uncertain of how I am perceived, and unsure how to perceive myself. As I create these sculptures, I am trying to turn that feeling into form. I use steel to draw disjointed lines through space that mirror the disjointedness I carry. The planes misalign because coherence is something I want but rarely feel. We live in a culture that rewards clarity. The more understandable, consistent, and polished you appear, the more you are accepted. I don’t have that kind of clarity. I want to be understood, but I fear I am not fully visible, even to myself. My sculptures begin to take form in that tension. Each sculpture is an attempt to externalize uncertainty, to turn something formless into something solid.

What emerges is a kind of architecture. These sculptures suggest empty rooms, corridors, thresholds. They feel structural but remain uninhabitable. As viewpoints shift, emptiness appears and collapses. These vacant spaces represent a quality of emptiness I know very well. I grew up in a home that was often empty in ways it should not have been. I spent long hours in stairwells, hallways, and basements. Over time, I became more comfortable in these in-between spaces that no one else inhabited. They were quiet. They asked nothing of me. As an adult, I feel most at ease in emptiness, in places where no one cares to look, where I am not expected to resolve into something understandable.

That emptiness carries its own texture, shaping the way I think about the duality of finishes in my sculptures. Clean, crisp, refined surfaces reflect the ways that I fulfill societal expectations, presenting a coherent, acceptable front. They also represent real accomplishments, capabilities, and social ease. Conversely, the intentionally raw, rusty, cracked, or broken elements expose emotional complexities and vulnerabilities that I find difficult to express. My autism often makes it challenging to move through the world in socially typical ways, creating barriers to authentic vulnerability in everyday interactions. In this sense, my sculptures perform a role that I often cannot personally fulfill. They are acts of visibility, expressing an emotional reality that I struggle to convey directly.

This series is an ongoing attempt to come to terms with who I am, especially the parts I find most difficult to confront. The act of creating is a way of reconciling myself with these challenges and contradictions, piece by piece.