* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
The objects I make come from seeing violence & pain in relation to suffering cuddly creatures. In Sartre’s Age of Reason, Daniel decides to punish himself by putting his cats in a basket and throwing them into the Seine. He imagines them clawing at each other as they drown, and in the end he brings them home instead of tossing them in. His impulse to access emotion via animal pain struck me as the most awful and decadent gesture, made in a context where war was looming but not yet touching his body.
In my relatively peaceful suburban upbringing, the death of a pet or a found dead bird became a memorable lesson in mortality. These images become the basis of a confrontation with a broader context for illness, violence, and the body. I make animations, installations, and works on paper to explore these emotional negotiations, to re-imagine the clash of brutal physical mortality with the hope of afterlife ideologies.
