I studied performance while I was an undergrad at SAIC. After I graduated, I had to take a step back and assess the toll that performing had on me. It was, like, really bad. It's not easy to put your body on a platter every day and serve it up to people who don’t care if you live or die. Performing made me so insane that I completely abandoned making art altogether. After floating through life practice-less for a little while and settling into an office job, I realized I had to figure out some other kind of outlet. I had experience making props and costumes for myself, so sculpture seemed like a fairly non-threatening option. Because my education is in performance, though, it's kind of the underpinning of everything I do and really at the forefront of how I think and speak about art objects. I don’t know if I would be able to make a sculpture without also thinking about things like narrative or gesture. Basically, I use performance as a framing device for my work because it’s sort of the only thing I know anything about, and I find it comforting on some level to know that I have these things that can perform for me since I can’t.

I’m really obsessed with crawling, bending over, and kneeling. It’s so flirty.

Sometimes the objects have names that are specific references. Violetta admonished by her lover and Louise quietly takes her exit were both included in a show at Espace Maurice that was about the opera singer Mary Garden. Violetta and Louise are both roles that Mary Garden originated, and I was using Garden’s repertoire as an entry point to try to wrap my head around what the sculptures were thinking or feeling. Usually, though, their names are just kind of a feeling. Like, yeah, this table looks like such a Tina.

I honestly think that I am forcing her out. I don’t think my work is ever happy that you’re looking at it; it’s always cowering in fear. I think, at the core of my practice, is this fixation on looking and seeing as a violent act, so I’m making these objects that are punishing you for being in the same room as them. In that way, I guess I have a kind of stage-mom relationship to my sculptures. They’re begging me not to make them, and I’m like, "You're on in five!"

I like mirrors because they're things that show you what you look like when you're looking at them. You get trapped inside the thing, flattened into its surface. I think it's a way to give a sculpture a little bit of agency. But also, the body isn't absent. I made it with my body, and you're looking at it with your body.

Shy Claire is blushing right now - Madame has just returned home from the theatre to find that she has neglected to dust the dressing table! Of course, Madame is so kind that there won’t be any punishment, but that is almost worse…

In theory, a sense of fear or of being threatened in some way, or a sense of ambiguity about who the perpetrator is and who the victim is. Like, who’s supposed to be scared right now? Is it you, the viewer, or her, the thing?

There’s a reason it hasn’t been photographed! You’re so nosy.

I’m interested in nostalgia to some extent; I’m really obsessed with vintage and antique things, but I don’t have any interest in romanticizing a specific time. My use of things that are old is more about creating a feeling of not-now-ness than it is about invoking a specific era. At the same time, though, because a lot of the materials that I use are trash, they’re these cheap facsimiles of nice things, or these strange, anachronistic combinations of various European styles that were popular or aspirational at some point. That does evoke a sort of bygone American optimism, and the materials themselves become these conduits for, or representations of, yearning and desire. At the end of the day, though, I’m kind of just going through your grandma’s storage unit and trying not to think too hard about the implications.

An endearment toward monstrousness. I’m very interested in the principles of cuteness that are outlined by Sianne Ngai in Our Aesthetic Categories: Cute, Zany, Interesting and how they overlap with how we culturally describe monsters - specifically in the presence or evidence of violence. Like, something is cute because it’s defenseless against violence, and that creates an urge within the viewer to protect or hurt it. Monsters, conversely, are scary because they reveal the defenselessness of our own bodies. The implication, threat, or presence of violence is inherent to both of these things, which are usually understood to be in opposition. I kind of think they're the same thing, in that cuteness reveals a lot of really ugly feelings and impulses, and monsters can also really easily tip over into being pitiful. I’m trying to find the formal qualities of a thing that can function on both sides to establish the presence of violence as both imperative and warning.