I design kinetic sculptures that deconstruct and reframe familiar objects from everyday life. Interactive kinetic sculptures stimulate a learning process between art and viewer. I choose to work with new media such as interactive interfaces, digital imagery, and electronic circuitry because these tools offer an exciting challenge that can’t be found with other forms of art. My artistic concepts drive my research and learning in relation to current and emerging new media technologies. Applying complex technical systems to art can sometimes overshadow concept. When people see my work, they engage with idea and form instead of technological properties because my sculptures hide the driving components within. My own curiosity with natural phenomena inspires my work. Examples include: making sound with different levels of water, utilizing the relationship between two magnetic elements, illuminating surfaces with light, or just simply blowing bubbles.

My work fuses my interest in these natural phenomena with objects from everyday life. Portrait of my Grandmother uses a digital image composed of plaques that grow on the brain, textbook definitions of the Alzheimer’s disease encased inside of Plexiglas, and water flow into a bedpan. The water flows from the top of the piece, over the Plexiglas and is recycled and re-pumped from the bedpan. The water symbolizes the washing away of my grandmother’s memory and bodily functions as her Alzheimer’s progressed.

As an artist, I am now most interested in the visual properties of light. In my current piece, Crawlers, light and movement create the artistic medium. Reflective metal cylinders shuffle erratically across a wooden surface. Each cylinder produces a beam of blue light from one end. As each reflective piece moves in its contained space, the beams of light reveal complex shadows and subtle patterns. Anthropomorphic connections emerge as one tracks the individual paths each crawler takes in the installation environment. The continuous questioning of what lies beyond our own physical and psychological boundaries as humans metaphorically is represented as the light transcends the tubes boundaries, searching outside their limits.