Forager

On Foraging

Forager serves as a feedback loop; an archive as well as a landing zone for new ideas. It uses knolling to make a sculptor’s scrapbook of reference material, maquettes, tests, proofs, and collected treasures. The Forager works began as a way to catalogue all the things in my studio I’d been holding on to from years ago - recycling old objects to make space for what’s new. Maintaining a sense of curation is an ongoing challenge when using found objects for art-making. With that in mind, having rules, logic, and reasons for source materials is a crucial component of my practice. I collect materials from multiple locations: the street, the home, and (self-referentially) the studio. 

I ask myself: Can I print from that? Can I etch into that? Can I carve it? Can this be disassembled into unrecognizable parts? 

When I’m asked where I get my supplies, people assume they’re procured from reflective rituals, self-care like ‘long walks on the beach’.  Foraging treasures while taking a long walk is romantic, but most of my materials are salvaged from fairly mundane routines. Especially from working in warehouses and printshops, cooking at home, or crafty hobbies I’ve abandoned. 

Using other people’s collections intentionally with my own feels like a collaboration with innumerable partners. A friend once shared her perspective on dreams about our dead fathers, “that the dream is our way of making new memories” with those we’ve lost. When I use tools, materials, and objects that were collected, saved, and valued by those I loved, I get to collaborate with them despite our lost time. Using materials from strangers’ personal collections sparks another kind of longing, wondering if their things were kept as treasures, useful tools, or personal nostalgia. 

I’m looking for object relationships; the ways things fit together just so. I build with cold joints; relying on forging, hammering, and riveting to resolve things. Working this way serves as a rage outlet, beating materials often masculinized to my own will. The results are small sculptures and prints that dance between hard and soft, sensual and sharp. They are talismanic totems / absurd ritual objects. Everything has been touched, manipulated, altered. Some as simply as being drilled into to mount like a trophy, and others aggressively reformed into something new. 

I do find a lot of satisfaction in foraging that last hour of a messy estate sale - the kind where you can dig through closets, attics, and kitchen drawers - where the gritty leftovers of daily life are intermixed with the “Good Stuff” that a typical estate sale shopper is looking for. I usually leave with an eclectic collection of things that probably would have ended up in the trash or the goodwill at the end of the day. In my studio, those leftovers have a chance to transform back to heirlooms, after I’ve beaten them into submission with my hammer.