Artist Statement

My artistic practice has shifted dramatically. The last year I have made a very conscious decision to embrace discomfort and focus on working sculpturally, something that I had never considered doing before. The immediacy and tactile nature of hot-glass sculpting has ripped the doors off of a mental barrier that I regret ever putting up. Sculpting feels right and working with materials, machinery, and equipment satisfies my desire to be active in the process of creation. Glass in all its forms has become my passion, and I am always searching for materials to mix with it to accentuate its finest qualities. Playing within all three dimensions has allowed my ideas to be lifted off of the page and bring them into the viewers local space. This allows them to hover around the objects, mimicking my perspective of my work as it floats around in my imagination before it is born into our shared space.

The forms in my Planar Constructions come out of my research into how points, lines, and planes build upon one another to construct a geometric model of space. As an experienced printmaker the properties of different papers were always in my periphery. With that in mind, it seems obvious now why I latched onto paper folding and manipulation techniques. Simple printer, and watercolor paper has proved to be an excellent and efficient way to investigate how flat two-dimensional planes can be broken and deformed to give rise to models with complex form. Material choice and production technique both speak to the constructed nature of these various topographies, and to all our self-curated experiences.

Fasteners are used in the building industry to join, attach, and secure separate elements together to form grander, more complex structures. These bolts, screws, nails, and staples are the mechanical lock that keep our modern world from falling apart. The Unfastened series produces a cryptic narrative frozen in time. The ruin-scapes depict fasteners that have fallen, decayed, suffered mortal wounds, or have lost their ability to provide structure. These fasteners can be seen as a stand-in for my own anchors to reality. My research into the interaction between the self and our external environment continues to erode these perceptual anchors that ground me.

Materials can be mysterious. Methods of construction can be well hidden, and architects may be deceptive. Beware of the ego. It loves to find comfort in false certainty.

Draper Matthews Spring ‘23