STRONGFELT Statement

As a craft person, I am deeply inquisitive of natural materials; the patterning of their growth and/or accumulation, deterioration and deformation and the impact of surrounding environments including broad human actions, as well as the agency of a pair of hands. As an artist, I am fascinated by systems and interference, methodology and chance, structure, damage and repair. All encompassing of my artistic practice is an attention to the porosity of materials, the space within and between, and processes that modify that internal space. These micro-environments provoke memories of spacial relations in my lived experience.

As a sculptor, I use qualities and measures of space to allude to psychosomatic states of being. Felt, a constant in my material repertoire, implicates human experience, as it is not only able to visually convey a range of states of vulnerability depending on the density to which it has been agitated/felted, but is made of animal hair with attributes similar to our own. Hair is a record of lived experience and this skin-like substrate and processes performed upon it, are emblematic of the impacts of familial/social structures and atmospheres. I gather human-made materials that exhibit the impact of external forces, natural materials whose structure presents visual metaphors of the human condition and tools that have a designed purpose of altering and defining concepts of space for a conversation about what is felt. I create abstracted social reenactments about being human to be worn on the skin and that occupy space and attention within a room.