“artist statement”

My practice consists of painstaking, punishing, often repurposed processes of both drawing and printing, such as drafting, intaglio, woodcut, lithography, and automatic writing, all with intense focus on detail. I use dense coloured pencil textures, multiple-plate prints, unforgiving materials (i.e. woodblock matrices), and temperamental supports (like vellum) as my media. These processes and the time it takes to complete them act as a veil between my hands and the viewer’s experience, while the repetition inherent to performing them is an attempt to legitimize what I’m making and what I’m doing. This legitimization is a crucial element of the work for me. My work deals with the perspective of being an outsider to things, of imitation and failure, of making something that is shaped like a familiar thing but on closer inspection is not correct. It’s also wrestling with attraction and rejection, the experience of being examined and sorted. Effort, and where I fail despite that effort, is the centre of my work. I tie this effort both in my work and my life to Gay masculinity, Camping, image literacy, fetish culture, and the notion of self-construction.

more plainly, i am making images that are trying to be what they are and not always succeeding, depending on who views them and their individual literacy in the language i’m trying to “speak”.