My work is a study of the body's paradoxical fragility and strength. Manifesting the productive relationship between body and psyche, my sculptures demonstrate embodied struggle against internal and external forces in detailed metal assemblages representative of human tissue and musculature. I make my sculptures using alginate molds taken directly from the body (usually my own) then creating waxes which I cut apart and reassemble into new forms, then cast in bronze or silver. I ask my viewers to complete these reconstructions, as centuries of viewers have allowed their eyes to continue interpreting empty space, filling in the gaps of incomplete Greek friezes or recovered, fractured statue-bodies.

My work questions the meaning representations of broken bodies can hold. It asks how viewers relate to the manipulation of images of the body and how the eyes complete interrupted forms and create missing parts. It wonders about the presence of pain in acts of bodily or psychic reconstruction. And it also interrogates the legacy of fragmented sculptural bodies and their paradoxical role in representing the wholeness of a new form to the viewing world.

Engaging with the long tradition of bronze sculpture based on the body, particularly that of ancient Greece, I also see myself responding to Freudian theories of the body, psychoanalytic ideas about the self and the soma, much of which Freud himself developed from his readings of ancient Greek myths. Physically mimicking and reproducing psychoanalytic thought in a series of three-dimensional self-portraitures, my work takes the subject apart and reconstitutes it in new forms. This project also reflects my personal experience. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, I lived in a back brace, designed to treat my scoliosis by constricting my bone and muscle development. The experiences of entrapment—and of the pain and sores and slow rotation of my core—have led me to a continued meditation on the brute forces in and upon the body: bones shifting under skin, parts pushed into place and muscles contracting under force.