My work is a folk-inflected binge on cultural novelty, heavily influenced by the particular breed of Americana that persists in the rural South where I came of age. In the Carolina foothills in the 1980’s and 90’s, life was an adulterated folk experience, equal parts home farming and canning, and Mountain Dew and Little Debbie.
Stylistically and conceptually, my work is based on a grotesque blending of these two distinctly American practices: homespun production and mass consumption. I employ Appalachian folk-craft not as a throwback to a vestige of a bygone down-home era, but as a way of propelling this contradictory mixture of American imperatives into the arena of contemporary art.
Borrowing from the folk methodologies of tinkering and re-purposing whatever is at hand in order to make ends meet, my work conflates novelties from popular culture and art history in a hand-crafted American folk digestion.
I process these novel forms and developments through a series of woodworking techniques, using chainsaws, routers, gouges, chisels, and knives. In a typically American fashion, little regard is given to their original contextual backgrounds. Instead, they are repurposed and recombined to form my own cultural novelties: a new, self-aware American folk production that harkens back to the Southern Gothic literary tradition in an uneasy embrace of both the self-made and the seduction of mass consumption.