Artist Statement
In general, the process of making these works is one of putting one mark next to another. This process is elaborated on as additional marks are placed adjacent to or over the existing ones. This has a quasi-performative aspect in which the work is determined, in time, by the speed and intensity of its production. The recursive juxtaposition of one thing next to another creates unexpected ripples and reverberations through the work. This activates the surface as a set of non-hierarchal structures - interlocking and overlapping at multiple scales.
The obsessive but also improvisatory accumulation of varied marks asserts the haptic quality of material while the unconstrained free-associative approach generates a kind of quasi-fractal ordering system. We might call these works handmade fractals or “haptic fractals.” The avoidance of specifically recognizable imagery emphasizes the pleasures inherent in our kinesthetic engagement with the world.
Similarly, forms might grow through aggregation, juxtaposition, or the accumulation of detail. Like biological or natural forms, they might grow, decay, or become parasitically invaded - as if infected by a virus or subject to out-of-control mutation or self-replication. The overall effect is not so much that of a mark-making system as that of a mark-making ecosystem: multiple entities overlapping and merging in unruly chaotic convergence, synthesis, and conflict. An intersection of forces.
As befits our times, these works are not generated by predetermined structures or images but by the action of one entity upon another - a result of numberless minute interactions and reverberations. There is no “whole” or “unity” except insofar as that presumed totality is an ancillary feature of some other part also. Imagine your social media streams as a kind of lapping oceanic tide, churning against the shores of our unconscious mind and then rendered as a zillion oscillating quantum data points. Psychic automatism for the age of the Internet.