Preview
Creation Date
2025
Dimensions
Dimensions vary
Materials
reclaimed wood door, sawdust, fake snow powder, green flocking, wood glue, methyl cellulose glue, bleach, acrylic paint, India ink, wire, yarn
Medium
Installation
Medium
Sculpture
Project Advisor
Rob Neilson
Year of Graduation
2025
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
COinS
Artist Statement
The work I am sharing now showcases the vital connection between my studio art and filmmaking practices that I am always exploring. The sculptures are set pieces and characters from my upcoming capstone film, “The Door In The Ground”, a curiosity and wonder-driven, textural fairytale that tells a quasi-magical story of the emotional journey I experienced when I finally learned that my very ill best friend had passed away. I imagine her going through a door that I am not allowed to follow her through. Time is understood in tactile layers, and the Bean Nighe (Washer Woman) steps away from being a feared omen. Instead, she is a loving caretaker of old things, and a protector of the unknown.
I fall back on textures, tiny moments, and sequential narrative in an effort to constantly remind myself (and maybe tell others) of my values. Closeness, awareness and empathy saturate most of the things I create because my goal is to push toward dreamlike, fantastical and ultimately somewhat unreal moments that pull internal experiences into the tangible, external world. I work across many mediums, telling stories through picture books, filmmaking, puppetry and animation; as well as sculptural installation art and prop-making. Each of these separate mediums connects back to my interest in creating atmospheres and seeing settings or objects as characters- infusing my space with magical realism.
Absolutely everything is sculptural. It wasn’t until I adopted this mindset that I was comfortable calling myself either an artist or a filmmaker, and it is a prominent theme in both my film, and the pieces I created for it. Making cuts and transitions when editing; deciding sequence in a story; determining how to shape an action with a puppet; layering paint or other materials onto a surface; curating objects to be part of a world; building up life onto the surface of things; all of these are sculptural endeavors that pay special attention to layers, collections, and what I can understand about something by touching it.