Fur Pipe Insulation, 2012 | rabbit fur, copper pipe
from the series, Design for the End of the World

This piece presupposes an era in which common synthetics have become scarce and primitive materials serve as substitutes in a variety of applications.

144-Piece Black Cloud, 2012 | neoprene foam, wire
from the series, Design for the End of the World

This is the first work in a series responding to beliefs that a cataclysmic event will occur in December 2012 — and the commercial implications of perceived disaster.

Choker [Piano Practice], 2012 | piano hammers, wire

Periodically, the city of Fort Collins, Colorado retires instruments from its ‘Pianos About Town’ public art program, through which I was given the opportunity to create work from cast off piano parts.

Sorting through a pile of pieces reminded me of an incident from my youth, when I was resistantly learning how to play. Increasingly frustrated, during one practice I remember leaning forward and biting the soft wood of the fallboard.

My design is therefore based on necklaces made of animal teeth, used in different cultures for adornment, barter, and as status symbols. On a personal level, the work represents an overdue and unexpected mastery of the instrument.

Full Twist, 2011 | rubber gasket centers, vinyl lacing, aspen trunk

The process of rubber extraction offers background to this piece. Because most of the rubber we use today has a synthetic origin, it’s easy to forget that natural rubber, in fact, comes from a certain species of tree. By applying a labor-intensive weaving process to these scrap gaskets and attaching them to an available tree trunk, the work highlights that, despite efforts to recycle and repurpose, we just can’t put the stuff back.

Downturn, 2011 | cork and rubber gasket centers

Looking at the cork harvesting process helped me conceive of this piece. I connected thin slices of machined material to resemble the strips that are removed from these trees. In addition, the circular forms evoke the rings used to count a tree’s age. Each small stack uses seven gasket centers pointing to the days in a week, while together the coils employ twelve columns, referencing months in a year.

This work took a surprising amount of time to construct, which made time itself an important conceptual component of the work. Not only does cork take about a decade to regenerate, but as a culture we require increasingly more time to piece together solutions to pressing environmental and economic issues.

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Alternate Units (1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8), 2011 | rabbit fur, polyfill

The global economic crisis and renewed interest in trading for goods and services provides a backdrop to these four sculptures. Made of fur, they evoke a period in history when pelts were used in barter. Each element decreases by one half in material in size, establishing a proxy unit of measure.