STATEMENT

I grew up on my grandfather’s 360-acre dairy farm in central Massachusetts, surrounded by cows, fields, and forests. Even as a child, I experienced the farm as a worker: feeding the cows, haying, driving tractors and trucks before my feet could reach the pedals. My relationship to nature was pragmatic, muscular, and sweaty; it smelled of manure, hay, and earth. Struggle—economic, physical—was at the core of this life; nothing came easily, everything was precarious.

Foundational to life on my grandfather’s farm was the Catholic Church. My grandfather was a rigidly devout man, and religious iconography filled the house: images of saints and the Crucifixion, of the Blessed Virgin, the Good Shepherd, and the Bleeding Heart of Jesus. Every Sunday we went to church, entering an interiorized, idealized space both physically and intellectually. The Crucifix at the front of the church, three dimensional yet viewed only straight on and at a distance, so that it appeared quite flat, represented an idealized vision of suffering and death, removed from the physical realities of crucifixion: weight, strain, deterioration.

I’ve carried these dual influences with me throughout adulthood. Nature and religion, united and transformed into an abstracted idealized iconography, are the basis of my artistic exploration. The wall pieces, pinned, crucifixion-like, to the wall, with their unchanging finish and effortless poise, lead the viewer from the material to the immaterial and back again, enacting the eternal human dialogue with the unknowable.