Q: Your practice has an interesting way to be both personal and informative, in the emotive qualities of the work itself, combined with the historical and scientific research that underlies it.
Can you talk a little bit about your approach to research, and how this comes into the process of creating the work?
A: It all develops pretty organically, My favorite shows or works of mine are the ones in which it seems like everything in my life, (what I’m watching, materials I’m interested in, and emotional state) all synthesize together. For example, in my last show, the blues, I knew I wanted to somehow incorporate metal into the felted work. I was making the work in the middle of the pandemic and it was winter and the days were short. I was feeling super melancholic and blue at the same time. I was also in the middle of reading articles about the search for a vaccine and the use of horseshoe crabs (and their blue blood), listening to podcasts about the Opium wars, thinking about the anti-Asian rhetoric going on at the time, and the aesthetics of aliens. So in my head, I felt like there was this circuitous narrative of leaching, metals, and the color blue throughout all these disparate subjects.