JSTN CLMN

My work as a Black artist starts with craft traditions and has moved into a more conceptual application of the idea of the way I understand craft; I consider craft the techniques/skills/way(s) an individual can physically change the built environment. Controlling the built environment is a means of empowerment; It is literally effecting physical change of the space or objects around you (or others). I consider the built environment (raw materials and objects included) to have elements of language and it performs similarly to a language and creates an ongoing dialogue; The built environment is read and understood by everyone, tacitly for most and overtly for the artist, crafts-person and builders (etc), I use my studio art practice as way to investigate ideas, interrogate notions and ask questions through making and intervening in this idea of the built environment. More specifically, I am interested in the places where cultural signals get crossed, where something is not so much this or that….or neither here nor there; where the taxonomies of value toggle back, and forth where the hegemony of clearly defined ideas fissure.