I have always loved art. One of my earliest memories is my dad and I walking to a small neighborhood diner when I was 4 or 5 years old and I saw the guy behind the counter show me how he could turn red and white into pink, and I was hooked from then on. It didn’t matter to me that he was merely stirring ketchup and mayonnaise together, I was paying attention to the colors. My first art class was taught at an art gallery; I was 5 at the time and thought I was making masterpieces. But I was taught an early understanding of the basics of perspective, color, and composition.

My art continued through college where I majored in studio art. What I began to do then was start to use a variety of mediums which triggered a love for finding a way to combine them. I had experience with sculpture from ceramics, computer images from photography, acrylic and watercolor from painting, and pencils from drawing. My first time truly combining the medium was making angled stones with Styrofoam, newsprint, and watercolor; and then gluing them together to form a purse made of rocks. That use of the rocks progressed to combining the handmade rocks with some real rocks and displaying them with a tilted glass vase that looked overflowing with rocks. From the far side of the room the fake rocks looked like the real; however, once approached the differences began to pop out to the viewer and a theory on perception was sparked within the viewer.

During that time I was also using clay to minimalize the form of a cat and make sculptures from slabs of clay. The construction of minimalized cat forms progressed to the forms of rabbits. The use of shapes that are more geometric rather than the true form achieved in realism is really appealing to me. The rabbit sculptures, especially the faces, make use of the minimalist theory of absence equaling presence. The faces of my rabbits don’t have sculpted eyes, but you can still tell where their focus is aimed at and the emotion they portray. Also their personalities are extended further with textures and colors on their bodies and the sculpture bases.