As an installation artist, I am compelled by my environment: the place, the season, the available materials. In fact, I am intrigued by mundane, seemingly ordinary materials, especially when they are removed from their usual contexts and combined anew. Familiar domestic settings are unsettlingly skewed, evoking sorrow, yearning, risk or simply meditation, contemplation. These are places to explore the delicacy and complexity of relationships; these are places to recall our ancestral roots, and honor the cyclic nature of our lives. I create moody and timeless environments, conjuring non-linear, lyrical narratives which trigger the viewers onto their own wanderings. I am especially interested in everyday customs and rituals including simple yet repetitive domestic tasks.

I tend to work site-specifically, either allowing the place to completely inspire the materials, concerns, content and form of the installation, or by bringing the ideas I've been working on in the studio to the site, remaining open to its influence. In this case, the space is acting as a living collaborator, affecting my ideas, challenging what I know, and ultimately sharing in the creation. It is important to me to work with, not dominate, the elements of the space to create a new and enveloping world, where the boundaries of the piece dissolve into its surroundings.

Through my work I am attempting to create an intangible tangible, to show change, to mark and hold time. The installations make real what is ethereal, grounding it by means of manifesting some type of physical transformation. I am interested in testing how a piece of artwork can alter its shape or form over its life. Frequently, I use performers in the work to mark the space with constant--usually mundane, gestural--movement. However, these are not performance art pieces in the contemporary sense; I consider the performance part of the visual process, part of the installations' transforming rite.

In the visual environment of these performed installations, ideally viewers are able to come and go freely, experiencing a portion of the performance, then returning later to see the progression. However, I often find that the audience stays focused on the piece, inviting themselves in, interacting spontaneously and living, for even a short period, within its framework.