BFA Thesis Exhibition, March 25-29, 2013

This body of work began with a song about sediments. I have been captivated by earth processes my entire life, so it is of little surprise that, for me, stacks of words are fluidly transposed as layers of stone. I repeat stories to myself and others in order to explain who, exactly, I am. These accumulated vignettes pile up, eventually becoming lithified into a "personal stratigraphy", which is easily and often altered by the metamorphic process of recollection. 

My stories feel inescapably interwoven with specific places, because I organize my life more geographically than chronologically. However, through making this work, I have discovered that the locations in which I feel so embedded only truly exist in my mind. Given the coordinates, you could stand in the spots where I was formed, but even then it wouldn't be precise enough. My experiences are a skin grafted across the factual framework of the land, and only when soldered together does a complete image of my home come into focus. I am attempting to plot out those intersections between empiricism and storytelling, and bring them into a physical existence.
A great deal of inspiration for this work was taken from my interactions with the Columbus Limestone – a middle Devonian layer of stone in which the ripple marks of an ancient sea floor are preserved. It surfaces in a N-S lying strip through the center of Ohio. I first became familiar with it in the creek beds of my grandmother's farm. Since then, my work has been pervaded by components of wave motion.