Art has the potential to “reflect the nature of our experiential lives and become a poetry of the actual.”    
                            - Julian Stair

This series explores how physical objects have the power to embody memory. Since childhood I’ve had a predilection for collecting. On family vacations my parents had to limit the number of stones I could take home so as not to weigh down the family van. In grad school I collected the shell fragments and magnolia seeds that were abundant in the North Carolina landscape. On a trip to New Zealand I filled my pockets with colorful stones from beaches across the country. One day sitting at my workbench it struck me that these objects deserved to tell their stories and I began to explore ways of incorporating them into my work. Each piece in this series tells the story of a specific place where I’ve lived or traveled.

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