I came to art later than most, and not for reasons I have always understood. I graduated with a degree in creative writing and when writer's block hit me 26 years ago I needed to figure out something else to do to keep my mind busy. For a long time that was stone masonry. Fifteen years of working with my hands, shaping things that take years to create teaches you patience whether you want to learn it or not. Mosaic tile wasn’t a leap for me- it was more like a slow drift. Same instincts, different scale. Instead of building walls, I started piecing things together in smaller spaces. Only now I could work year round and not just in the summer.

When I make work for myself, the cosmos seems to be what inspires me most. There’s something about scale- seeing yourself in something so large it makes your personal concerns feel both insignificant and more manageable. Plus, it gives me opportunities to work with lots of colors which stone masonry often lacks.

The work I’m making now is different. For the first time, I am making work for public consumption. Maybe for this reason I felt that my work couldn’t be about outer space but instead had to be about our shared space.  Like a lot of people, I’ve found it harder to stay quiet about the political and social climate in this country. It only seemed to make sense that in this situation, where the stakes are too high to ignore by looking outwards to the heavens, that I created works that acknowledge how significant our situation is and how unmanageable it is becoming.

I sometimes describe myself as a conceptual artist, though that label feels a little generous. The truth is, I work conceptually because I don’t have the technical skill set to say what I want to say through more traditional forms like painting. So instead, I build with ideas the same way I used to build with stone- patiently and with the hope that in the end it has meaning.

My current works center on the idea of doing one’s part in the face of something that feels larger than you. It reflects a kind of ongoing tension we all feel: trying to remain sane, trying to remain decent, and trying to believe that individual actions still matter in a time that often suggests otherwise.