I make sculpture that conjoins hand-built and painted ceramic forms with everyday, industrial materials. Informed by themes of intimacy and codependency, my sculptures counterbalance bodily shapes with utilitarian support. With a nod to surrealism, they conflate strength with vulnerability, the found with the handmade, and the abstract with the figurative. I think of each piece as a different character—one that balances a bright playfulness with a sense of fragility and eventual entropy. By means of empathy, they become a mirror of the psychological self, specifically relating to my identity as a gay male and sentiments associated with gender and assimilation.

Simultaneously melancholic and comedic in demeanor, my sculptural work anthropomorphically exudes a sense of prideful awkwardness. The ceramic forms drip, slump, fold, and lean, physically interacting with (and at times depending upon) their solid structural bases. The connections between these two elements metaphorically allude to a sense of longing for permanence and structure, weighted down by the exhaustions and imperfections inherent in human interactions.