Artist Statement

I’m a collagist. I steal fragments - a vision, or a scrap of overheard talk, a body, a moment in time - and then cut them together until a seam splits open: an edge-place where wildness breaks loose and shows its teeth.

I work at thresholds - the charged places where unlike things touch, time stops behaving, and categories fall apart. It’s a compulsion: if there’s container, I'll push against it, and the moment I'm free of it I go looking for the next. What I'm pushing against (and pushing for) is wildness: not the remote-landscape kind, but the ungovernable complexity that runs through everything and erupts through every structure built to hold it down. The two we tend to wall off the hardest are the two the body can’t ignor:e sex and death. The orgasm is la petite mort, an ecstatic threshold… and the wildness we most refuse to look at is, well, the fact that we die. To me, they're what makes everything else matter.

So, in my plays I build thresholds and hold them open for as long as I can. I pull people into a temporary commons - we break bread, we sing, we drink wine, we interact through our glowing screens - and it's inside that threshold that the wild thing emerges from: the dead show up, the plague leaks through the party, and the animal breaks through the mother. And, in a world that privatizes connection and sells it back to us, real shared presence is itself a wild, ungovernable thing.

Collage is a perceptual training ground: a way of building the appetite to stay inside the threshold instead of bolting for a rigid order and a false sense of certainty. I want to stay awake in the grey area, the middle, a little scared, but very much alive, and I suppose I really want other people to want it there, too.

I move fluidly between performance and visual art, often finding the answer to one piece inside another. I practice attunement: listening to collaborators, materials, the room, to animals, land, and weather, staying open to what's alive in front of me instead of forcing what I had planned. The garden and the animals are where I re-tune - and where I learn about death on the daily: things grow, things die, everything goes back to the soil. My work is embodied; it happens in real time, in the room, in the body, and that’s usually where the ideas arrive.

Undeniably, we are living at thresholds -- ecological, technological, political, personal. I don't resolve these tensions. I build disruptions that hold them open for a little while, and hold us there, awake and together.