Moving from Arizona almost three years ago meant editing down my possessions to fit in the back of a pickup truck that my best friend, two cats, and myself shared for three very long days.  I’ve been moving on average about once a year since I was fourteen.  This nomadic lifestyle meant constantly having to get rid of things that felt unimportant, insignificant, and a dead weight. Certain things, however, have survived the moves.  These objects hold memories and are a part of me.  It’s the knick knacks that have made it with me, up on shelves filling the empty walls in my room, with my clothes in piles strewn about the floor in a constant state of clutter.  Still, the bedroom is a curated space of possessions out on display, showcasing the important things one owns.  Importance rooted in memory and identity, in home.  Home is not always a house though, my home is landscape too.  My memories are the mountains that surround the valley of Phoenix, the brown dirt and how all the plants have thorns.  I miss the desert, cement buildings, the sun, and dry heat as I’m stuck in the intense green, the frigid cold, and humid summers that come with living in the Northeast.  

 My work explores memories through the lenses of the bedroom, landscape and material possessions.  In my work, memory, immersion, and installation are one, where the viewer is enveloped.  Viewers enter a bedroom space with objects on the walls, piles of clothes scattered about the floor, onto which a video of saguaro cactus blooms overlaying the streets and mountains I always passed by while driving around the Valley is projected.  The piles are my old clothes that have been stowed away in garbage bags waiting for me to get rid of them.  Now they are cast in iron, permanent and transformed.  Their shadows, mountains looming over the vision of my home.  The viewer’s bodies add and change the shadows, the installation in a constant state of fluctuation.  My possessions cast in bronze and porcelain  sit atop bleached oak shelves becoming moments of clarity amidst the installation and their repetition along the walls as individual memories within that object.  Together, these objects are permanent impermanence, my bedroom always moving, my possessions locked in iron and bronze.