Artist Statement

A sheet of paper, folded into quadrants, cut once by hand, opened. What comes back is bilaterally symmetrical, one thing and two mirrored halves at the same time. I have been making that gesture since before I could say why. The world it comes out of is one continuous process: what we call natural and what we call made are not two kinds of thing, they are the same process at different moments. A cell, a reef, a glyph, a building and that sheet of paper are arrangements it has taken, and none of them stepped outside it in order to be made.

The studio is where that conviction meets material. I work from it as a starting condition rather than toward it as a conclusion, and I say so plainly: it is a premise, and no object I make could prove it. What the objects do is give it something to push against. Cut paper, oil paint, digital print, resin, wood, and six hundred pounds of fabricated aluminium and steel hanging in an Austin fire station. Working this way I keep arriving at forms that organisms and ancestors arrived at long before me, because a form solving a problem tends to land in the same place twice. Two threads run through the work that way: forms that carry the logic of organisms, and forms that carry cultural inscription. I have called them Patterns for Life and Ancestral Forms, and I am now working to bring them back together. D'Arcy Thompson argued in 1917 that physical forces acting on material produce much of the shape we credit to design. I work as though that holds at the scale of a hand and a sheet of paper.

We are the ones who put the seams in, and we have excellent reasons to. A category is the most useful tool a mind has, I use them constantly, and I could not get through a morning in the studio without them. Each one also charges a price. Cut paper made in Mexico is filed as folk craft and cut paper made in a gallery is filed as sculpture: same gesture, same material, same age, and only one of them is permitted ambition. Ruth Asawa learned her looped wire technique from basket makers in Toluca in 1947, was filed under craft for most of a career because of where it came from, and put civic commissions across San Francisco anyway. The category did real work and it took something, and the bill came due when people stopped noticing it had been drawn. A category stays a tool for exactly as long as we remember making it.

The practice has not held still. The first series, in 2006, was oil paintings of hives, bombs and jellyfish, arguing about what humans are for on a planet they are busy rearranging. By 2010 the work had gone dark and three dimensional: a room of internally lit figures staging four separate accounts of one climb toward union, and a set of canvases whose text was only legible under a black light. Then I left. I followed the curiosity into a biomedical engineering degree and spent years inside other people's systems, learning at the molecular level how the ones I had been drawing actually work. What brought me back in 2019 was a public commission. The thesis I built afterward explained the forms well and said nothing about why I had been making them, and I ran on that incomplete version for most of a decade.

The part I cannot account for is why none of this feels true from the inside. If the continuity is real then I came out of it and so did everyone, and we still experience ourselves as separate. That gap is the question the practice is actually pursuing: why a continuous world produces beings who feel singular, and what we build out of that feeling. What we build is strange. We reach for the whole in order to be recognised as a distinct part of it. Belonging and distinction turn out to be one movement, and nearly everything people make to mark themselves is also a request to be let in. Twenty years of objects keep arriving at the same shape as that question.

The habit of dividing has a history and a geography, and mine runs through both. In Nahua thought, as contemporary scholars reconstruct it, teotl is a single continuously self-generating process, and everything that exists is a momentary configuration of it rather than a separate thing made out of it. The split between nature and artifact is simply absent there, because one was never drawn. I was born in Guadalajara and raised on the Texas border, which is the other kind of line: invisible in the material, decisive in effect. The work gets made inside the tradition that drew the line, by someone whose other tradition did not.

Two permanent commissions carry the same argument outdoors, where it has to work on a passerby in a second, and both of them are completed by a body. A Place For Our Thoughts stands outside the Pflugerville Public Library: a red aluminium head, the back of the skull opened into a Voronoi lattice, nineteen people's silhouettes cut into the voids. They are specific people who sent me photographs, forward facing, so the outline of a head dissolves into the lattice and you have to look to find anyone. The seat is inside the skull, and whoever sits down becomes the twentieth figure: inside the mind, part of the pattern, and plainly themselves at the same time. Two Live By A Star hangs in the entrance of the rebuilt Austin Fire Station 25 and Travis County EMS Station 10, two cubes interpenetrating into a star seven and a half feet across and lit from inside, for two services that were separate organisations and now share one building. You pass under it going in. Gego hung a room of hand knotted wire in Caracas in 1969 and called it Reticularea, and the whole point was that you stood inside the net instead of in front of it. In both of mine the viewer is not looking at the pattern. They are in it.