My work addresses the ways objects and actions configure space. This presumes that space is not an unmediated category of experience but is a result of various perceptual, representational, and constructional techniques influencing the ways people occupy the built environment and encounter one another. Of these techniques, I have a specific interest in manual processes of fabrication (repetitive gestures) and architecture (structures delimiting interaction). Both produce things with dimension and form, but they also establish sequences of assembly and coordinate the movements of bodies and objects through space and time (performance). In doing so they constitute relational systems defined by physical and social parameters.
Although I typically use textile or fibre-based processes, simple actions like tearing, tying, or touching are formal elements in my work. I consider these elements to be significant practices imbued with meaning and integral to the production of space. Through the repetition and accumulation of these operations I make small objects, site-responsive installation, and performance. Each project has a different focus, but re-presenting distance is a consistent theme in my work. Its double sense as a quantifiable attribute (how far apart things are) and as an emotional remove (a dissociation inhibiting intimacy) simultaneously frames space in concrete and communicative terms -- or, as a function of environmental conditions and the social, ideological and cultural underpinnings structuring its organization and use. This notion of reciprocity is a way of acknowledging the capacity of one's actions to engender spaces of contact, proximity and variation within a dominant order.
This artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
