While mourning the death of a college friend, I was forced to examine many decisions I had taken for granted in my own life. As a result of this exploration I made some very significant life changes. The opportunity for wisdom and subsequent change that an experience grants left a powerful impression on my thinking and my direction both in art and in life.

My work attempts to provide visitors with a powerful experience something that, "has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement" (John Dewey, Art as Experience). I want to sculpt experiences for people that provide deeper insight, reflection and connection. My sculpture is not trying to represent a previous experience or feeling but instead focuses on creating a new experience. I try to discover and design with components that seem to exist within life's powerful experiences, this may include touch, gaze, movement, concentration and time. While a visitor is involved with a piece I create I hope that it is within the experience (rather than just the visual) that the viewer discovers the aesthetic of my art.

Some characteristics I try to incorporate into my art are both the passage of time and something that does not exist in the everyday without sculptural manipulation. In Locked Gaze I created a situation that was outside of the norm of the gallery and lasted for a period of time. Viewers were left looking into each others eyes for an extended period in a public gallery setting, yet no one else in the gallery was able to see the two individuals while they made contact. Each participant's experience was varied but many people reflected afterwords on the intensity of the interaction. Locked Gaze helped clarify the concept of a sculpted interaction. A piece's ability to purposefully create limits and allowances in an interaction that under normal circumstances would not exist. In addition, in the case of interaction I am not interested in a piece responding to a person as much as I am interested in a person interacting with another person or through the piece. This is an important distinction because most art that classifies itself as interactive is creating an interaction between only the viewer and the piece.

In addition to interactions between people, as in the locked gaze piece or back to contact piece, my time building my studio and living in Taos has made me very aware of experiences focusing on reflection. The umbrella fountain and my upcoming labyrinth proposal are both works that deal with the development of the private experiences.

I finished a masters in social work, a two year experiential training in Hakomi Psychotherapy (a somatic mindfulness based psychotherapy) and a two year training in family therapy. I want to integrate experiential studies in psychology into my artwork to create psychological pieces. I believe that to go deeply into one subject within art one must immerse yourself in the study of that subject in addition to the study of art itself. I also believe that science has too often been used as the sole means to study psychology. Science can be restricted by its need for definitive answers to questions that are often amorphous and evolving. I hope my pieces will offer another realm to study the person.