About the Artist

My development as an artist began at a very young age. My mom always had new and interesting art projects for my brother, sister and me to occupy our time (everything from pinch pots, to plaster, to watercolors.) We would spend hours at the kitchen table or out in the garage perfecting our works, and every piece we created was treated as if it were a masterpiece. I continued to sketch, collage, and watercolor throughout high school. However, I never really considered myself a visual artist.

While I was pursuing an education in theatre at The University of Southern Mississippi, I fell in love with the wood shop and creating the worlds where the plays occurred. I enjoyed building scenery very much, but the sets we created were always destroyed after the run of the play. As someone who has always had an affinity for objects that have been around for a long time and have stories attached to them, I didn't like the fact that all my hard work was temporary. I found myself wanting to create things that were more personal and long lasting. I wanted to make things that someone could own and treasure for a lifetime, things that people would want to pass down to future generations, and things that would have their own stories. I thought I could combine this desire with my love of the wood shop by pursuing a career in woodworking and building one-of-a-kind pieces of fine furniture.

I left the theatre and after a short sabbatical began studying Fine Art at The University of Mississippi. I wanted my furniture to be artistic and combine new ideas implemented through an age-old craft. My time at Ole Miss enhanced my love and appreciation for all forms of visual art. I enjoyed learning about the history and progression of art, and I found myself engrossed in my assignments. I especially enjoyed printmaking, painting, and ceramics classes. My printmaking professor Sheri Fleck-Rieth was a great influence and inspiration to me. She taught me to think about process, to research my subject matter in order to have a better understanding of it and to create added depth in the content of my work. She taught me to listen to my own voice, to make my work more personal, to not be afraid to make mistakes, to learn from mistakes and to implement these lessons into future works. She helped me to think about works in series and to explore ideas fully, and encouraged me to work through obstacles I encountered in my work through persistence and experiments in different mediums to find the best way to express my ideas. These lessons have helped me not only to continue to create bodies of work, but to continually cultivate new ideas and to improve my knowledge and skills as an artist.

In addition to working towards a degree at Ole Miss, I attended several woodworking workshops at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee to learn more about the craft. After graduating from Ole Miss, I was accepted to a six-week work-study position at Arrowmont for the summer of 2007. While I enjoyed my class with Travis Townsend, which sought to explore an artistic side of woodworking, I found myself frustrated by my difficulty to think in three-dimensions and lack of original ideas. I felt trapped by the limitations of the medium. The frustration continued in my next workshop; a veneering class. The work was tight and technical. Angles must be precise and my desire for perfection never allowed me to be satisfied with my work or to enjoy the projects. My next workshop that summer was scheduled to be a model-building class, but I could not stand the thought of another week of what I imagined would be more technical and tedious work.

I decided instead to take an abstract painting class with Jeanine Anderson because I had enjoyed painting so much in college and desired more instruction in the medium. This class was an important turning point in my career as an artist. As we began to work, I found in myself a flurry of ideas and took real joy and satisfaction not only in the works I completed but also the process of creating the works. I rediscovered a love of collage and mixed media work that had not left me from those high school days. I realized I had always been an artist but I just wasn't aware of it in those early years. In Jeanine's class, I began to combine texture, layering, placement, and color in the collages I created. I have not been able to stop working since. On a walk with some fellow artists, I found a page from a scrapbook with twelve photographs on it in an old abandoned house. They were pictures of a curling team on a trip to a curling tournament. I couldn't help but wonder who these men were. Where had they been? Where are they now? Working with photocopies of them in my collages, I found a love for taking old, and perhaps, forgotten imagery and using them in my work in a way that makes them new and relevant again. My aim is to give them new life, and ask the viewer to see them in a different context. It is a theme that has and continues to give me a tremendous amount of inspiration for completed, continuing, and future bodies of work, and is what I would say is the underlying theme of my work. I have found I have been able to create the works I had originally desired to those days in the wood shop, works that have a history and a story, works that will hopefully be treasured for generations to come. They just happen to be mixed media works instead of pieces of furniture.