The Poop is an act of rebellion against the oppressive force. My initial inspiration came from how fed up I was with my life, how frustrated and constrained I felt by my surroundings and how much I wanted to just shit over all of it. It is confrontational. This collection represents the things that we naturally produce through our interactions with each other or even just through the sheer fact of being alive.

The artists that I am most closely responding to are Ted Adler,Nicola Tyson and Henrique Oliviera. Their work shares a force against gravity and against itself. They seem to be reacting to the weight of their surroundings, moving and reshaping itself against or even with it. They change in compliance to greater weight but remain very strong and heavy. Whether it is the size of a room or only the size of my fist, the work seems to state that it is there and that it is not going anywhere. Their work shows resilience and strength, adaptability and mutability that allows it to remain strong, if not become stronger. Those are the characteristics I hope to convey in my work, a strength that withstands change through malleability and a force that can only be withstood through interaction, rather than avoidance. I’ve chosen clay because it is such a malleable material. Clay compromises with you, it’s nature and essence does not change, yet it allows you to mold it. Clay is one of the most flexible materials in existence, yet it is also the strongest. The malleability, the opulence and viscosity of what I’ve created stands in contrast with the the stark, straight edge lines of it’s surrounding walls and pedestals. Despite their mutations, they remain functional pieces. They are simultaneously offensive in topic and intriguing in composition, a dichotomy that exists in most socio-political interactions.

One of my favorite writers is Stephen Prothero. His books, talking about politics and religion, deal with the core issue of miscommunication, the avoidance when interacting with each other and all of the problems that this creates. “Words tie people together and they drive them apart.” He talks about how our interactions have mutated the status quo, standards and ideals and how, as a society, we have responded to the change. Things around us are always changing, responding, and it is both beautiful and repulsive, but it is essential to have a willingness to address the changes, to seed through the bad, to find the good. Prothero states that “Our republic is a republic of letters” and because we depend so much on communication, and because words are subjective to who says them and who is hearing them, ”in every generation the nation must me imagined anew.” Taking this into consideration, I have to wonder what happens if the voices of intolerance and hatred are louder and what happens when we stop talking altogether.

The biggest problem I see today is that we have stopped talking about the society we live in, we censor passion for or against everything, but this only begins an avalanche of division and ignorance. We let others speak for us and are afraid to voice our own opinions. The people doing the talking are hostile and defensive because we have lost our ability to disagree without killing each other. There is a definite force working on us, like gravity, it is pushing down on us. It is our job to change, to adapt, and to retain our strength and unison in order to avoid the breaking point. By concentrating all these loaded ideas into everyday objects, like jars and bowls, and placing them in plain view, I’m extending an invitation to engage in a conversation that we frequently avoid, literally placing it on the table.