Gender, joinery, and ecology are at the heart of my practice as a visual artist. I am driven by a fascination with the inchoate and the unknown, invested in how objects can be queered and their meaning altered to speak to the interdependent and the intimate. Kinetic and sound sculptures in particular, which are central to my practice, demonstrate the emotive aspects of humanness– the fallible, mundane, and repetitious. My work presents an assemblage of seemingly disparate sculptural and installation elements, which set in motion dialogues concerning wellbeing, human relationships, consumption, and survival.

An early work from 1998, Two Pan Tops Can Meet, reclaimed a homophobic saying I encountered while working as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Jamaica. The proverb “two pan tops can’t meet” was a perplexing, humorous, and perilous warning that I could not come out for fear of my personal safety. In the pan lid I discovered an everyday object that could be queered; it made sound when struck and allowed me to speak back to a heteronormative culture. This led to a series where I repurposed discarded pan lids, collaborated with composers to resound queer futures with these sound sculptures.

Using everyday and found objects in my work also allows me to raise questions about gender, as well as consumption and ecology. For the last decade, I served on the prominent Recology Artist in Residency board in San Francisco. The profound effect of being surrounded by our trash reaffirms my concerns with the environment and sustainability. Over time I have come to understand ecology and queerness as ‘strange friends,’ as both confound boundaries, reject sameness, and imagine new ways of being. Both address complex webs of biodiversity and intimate interdependence that multiply difference and reject binaries and essentialist notions of being. Both reveal that beings exist relationally. Through my creative practice I continually grapple with this dilemma: As resources shrink, how can queer ecology lend alternatives to our exploitive systems?