The steel I-beam, the structural language of industrial modernity, the way the column or arch defined earlier architectural ages, is recurring in my work; a starting point. I fabricate, forge, distort, cut and reassemble that language. Steel resists improvisation; it is precise. I’m drawn to forcing it to behave otherwise, letting distortion and error become form, rather than mistakes to correct. A rigid structure, worked loose, phrase by phrase, until something more improvisational emerges from something that was never intended to bend, embodying a jazz logic. I approach my work from that foundation, often taking disparate ideas and challenging myself to find the intersection between them through material and form. This extends, conceptually to the emotion of my work, discovering the light, joy, and humor found among dismal places, keeping my work from tipping into elegy and focusing on life, growth, resilience, and reemergence.

Growing and and living in the Midwest ‘Rust-belt’, I’m drawn to landscapes industry built, and then abandoned, where nature reclaims what was left behind. This resilience is baked into the landscape and the people here. A body of work is emerging from this idea directly: I-beams sprouting into rebar mushrooms, inky caps, where the pillar or ‘trunk’ is broken down, transmuting into a new, decentralized and communicable form, like that of the mycelial intelligence of fungi. Decay and new life in the same gesture, like that of the new tech age replacing the fading dominance of the industrial age. That tension, between order and collapse, is the subject, not just the method. You can arrive at your own sense of what’s collapsing, and what’s growing in its place.