I want viewers to enter a stage setting where the objects are ordinary but can’t be put to use or fully understood: animal attire left open for a human body to occupy, or animal forms endowed with human attributes. Like items from a sixteenth century curiosity cabinet, my objects aim to provide evidence of another reality. With my paintings and sculptures, I want this reality to impress itself on viewers in a way that competes with mundane experience, just as myths lend greater depth to the perceptions of our senses. I produce alter egos for both human and non-human animals that emphasize their interrelation of identity—an interrelation that also speaks to the deep interconnectedness of life in the age of catastrophe in the natural world by global warming and other manifestations of the physical intrusion of humans in the natural world.

My paintings develop as narratives or as stills from an event that is about to happen or has just taken place in an order of experience parallel to—even immanent within—but nonetheless distinct from our mundane experience. They offer access to a surreal landscape wherein familiar characters appear and operate in unexpected and inscrutable ways.

I want the sculptures that I make to function as containers for spirit. Sometimes bare, sometimes adorned, they create a space to be filled with unfamiliar and elusive intensities: an animal energy that suffuses what is human, and a humanity that resides in objects and beasts.

The resulting work aims to provide the substance of things both feared and hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.