Statement of Practice
I care about what it means to do good work. Not work that performs goodness, but work that holds, that serves, that is well considered for the place it enters. To make something well is to attend to it, and to attend is a form of love.
For me, making and understanding are not separate steps. I do not research a subject and then represent it; the work is how I come to know it. A monument campaign, an exhibition, a piece of public design is not the illustration of something figured out beforehand. It is how the questions get asked, and often the only way the answers arrive.
Much of what I work on is the relationship between people and place, and what strains it — policy, displacement, disaster, the economic forces that scatter communities and pull them from the ground they come from. Memory is what holds that bond across the distance, the infrastructure that lets a people stay in relation to a landscape they no longer stand on. It can be tended or neglected, and the forgetting of a place is rarely an accident: a question of what was built to last and what was left to erode. To study this from inside a community rather than about it, I use what the situation needs — oral history, exhibition, organizing, design. The range is not indecision; it is the method.
No single project holds what I am really after. I want more people to be remembered, and more of the ground they came from to remain theirs. Art, for me, is a way of being in the world in order to understand it, and of choosing together what is worth building well and passing on.