I employ processes and techniques of metalsmithing and object making to address global issues of production, labor, heritage, and representation. Travels in South America, China, Southeast Asia, and West Africa have influenced the perspective from which I study and respond to relationships between people and place in the shaping, defining and reinventing of individual and collective identities. Through the use, translation, and interpretation of ubiquitous and mobile objects my work attempts to reclaim the space between what is lost and re-invented in the transformation and evaluation of our material world.

The plastic basket is a mobile and transnational object. Similar to many commodities that are produced in one country and consumed in another, these baskets provide evidence of contemporary production regulation and its existence between places. Markers define country- Made in India, company- New Ocean Plastics, or production code- No. 901. Designating coding for global exchange these markers reduce human?s relationship with production labor and distribution labor to complex numbering systems or simplified to a vast country.

The works in this series Touchmarks: The Social Life of Plastic Baskets are fragments of plastic baskets cast and fabricated in pewter. Additionally, plastic corporate ?touchmarks? are cast from plastic baskets into pewter and embedded within the individual objects providing a new context for the distance between producer and consumer to be recognized and contemplated. How are relationships between places defined by the markers that identify one place from another? How does that reflect preserved notions of identity and belonging? What relationships can be identified as commodities flow between seemingly disparate cultural contexts and what systems of hierarchy does that expose?

I was raised in Madison, WI, received my BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004 and MFA from State University of New York at New Paltz in 2009.

I actively exhibit work and teach metalsmithing workshops both nationally and internationally. I was awarded an artist residency at Oregon College of Art and Craft- Portland, Oregon in 2009, and participated in a group installation that was exhibited at the Siamo Qui/We are Here Conference in Florence, Italy in 2008. I currently live and work in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, teaching art at UW-Milwaukee.