Artist Statement

Artist Statement

The National Lint Project is an interactive inquiry into community-based art-making processes. For the past nine years, hundreds of people have donated dryer lint, had it sculpted, exhibited and returned to them through the course of this ongoing investigation. Ultimately, each sculpture is a document of everyday life found within a mundane, material fluff and transformed into a gestural figure. It is my hope that through the transformation of such a discardable material, a liminal space between reality and the imaginings of the viewer is created which in turn encourages them to more actively consider the “real” world in which they exist. At the very least, viewers of the work will pause for a moment and think the next time they clean out a lint trap, which, considering the banality of this task, is no small feat.

I am fully aware that my work is funny and dangerously close to laughable. I make sculptures out of dryer lint. I am significantly more interested in making work that forces people to expand their preconceived boundaries for art or dismiss it than in making work that very clearly falls into an existing category. This giggle-inducing power of the project is what makes it accessible to a non-traditional arts audience of bank tellers, nurses, lawyers, shelter residents, children, and working class people of all kinds. Laughter cracks the veneer people put up for art when they don’t understand it, after which real conversations about art, community and the aesthetics of daily life can happen. It is my position that humor in the space of serious work is significantly more difficult to achieve and closer to the edge that I want to explore. In addition to the humor in the work, my collection of over 500 letters from people around the world about dryer lint, when read together, construct a collective portrait of American culture, a culture that includes deep sentiments and valued memories as well as a destructive need to mechanize all processes and an attachment to an excess of material goods.

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"Angels and Other Creatures"

Exhibit at Three Rivers Arts Festival Gallery

707 Penn Avenue, Downtown Pittsburgh

December 13, 2002 through February 14, 2002

Exhibits of my work serve as snapshots of a moment within a process, rather than the end result of creative explorations. For example, two recent exhibitions, Angels and other Creatures at The Three Rivers Arts Gallery in downtown Pittsburgh and Angels in the Laundromat at Duds ‘N Suds Laundromat, a working Pittsburgh laundry, served as counterpoints to each other. Specifically, these installations explored the differing expectations for art in a gallery and art in the space of everyday life on the part of both traditional and non-traditional arts audiences. An interactive performance art piece at Angels in the Laundromat also collected the attendee’s conceptions of angels and rituals in a mundane space. Viewed in relation to each other, the installations highlight the fuzzy boundary between art and what falls just beyond that category. I make every attempt to install work in non-traditional, public spaces concurrently with exhibitions in traditional venues to solicit conversation about art among people that might otherwise dismiss it as beyond the boundaries of their world.

Currently, I am most interested in the relationship between my large-scale sculptural figures (not angels) and my rag-tag collection of correspondence. My current studio work includes the creation of wall- and ceiling-mounted figures of human-scale created from the lint of households who have donated one year's worth of material as well as notes about their laundering rituals and musings on lint.