Artist Statement Biggie

I grew up in an oil town in the deserts of West Texas - a town that experienced crime waves with economic booms. It’s a place that bends to the vicious cyclical nature of commodity and crash, where more money means more pregnant kids, more violence, more backhanded opportunities and the strain on already fragile relationships between people of different races and genders. At 15 I became a foreign exchange student in Ghana, further complicating my understanding of global social systems and instilling in me a passion for truth. Living in such a transitional and pivotal time, known as the Anthropocene, I feel compelled to expose the chain links between the industrial power structures that moved us here and the people who carried them on their backs. There is no point at which industry ends and man begins. They have built up and within each other like a scab absorbing a bandage, unsustainable progress suspended in liminal time, waiting for the inevitable and painful repercussions. In my studio, objects are born from pain waiting, frustration, exhaustion, and the desire to challenge both my understanding and dialogue with the world around me. Using ceramics, wood and metal I create figures and landscapes that mimic the dysfunction and destruction of Anthropocentric relationships while simultaneously questioning the systems that created them. My current work exists in the realms of discomfort and heartache. It is the quiet of a dry river bed, of a forest without trees, of abandoned buildings and floating plastic bags, allowing the viewer time to ask themselves to relinquish their comfortable blindness, and see the world as it is.