When I was young, I remember my father sitting at the sewing machine patching his Wranglers in the evening after work. The farm crisis had reached our place near Flint, MI and he was making do: A concept of thrift and pragmatism that dictates you work with the materials at hand. That memory mixed with the stories of other working people, leading me to denim as a material. It is a universal fabric born in the dust of the cotton field, made supple by the sweat of garment workers, and embedded with the fading of second shift evenings. Its qualities amplified my own ideas about materials and class, providing stronger coupling between content and form.

My practice is rooted in understanding how we relate to labor. My close proximity to the manufacturing and agrarian landscapes of America, as well as the dramatic shifts in both of those sectors of our economy during my lifetime, have led me to continuously pursue an understanding of its people and craft. Making has brought with it a comprehension of the complexity of forces that drive our contemporary economy. The cultural practices that unfurl as a result of those relationships taught me strategies for crafting a working life that embraces wholeness and integrity as antidotes to estrangement from objects and one another.

Persistence in difficult times is the art I’m most interested in. I continue to be inspired by the ways in which people make do for themselves. Whether it was a trip to the scrapyard or the back of the pantry, there was usually a way to work around material deficits. I use the shared memories and skills that those around me do out of a need for function, beauty, or survival to honor them, mixing memory and materials to create something of value from nothing. “Fix’n things up” prolongs their worth and I still find some life in the materials, methods, and motivations of those I grew up with. Although separated by distance and time, the people I come from reemerge in my studio to remind me of our shared struggles and resilience.