Tell about an incident that had something to do with water…

In September 2013 the Front Range of Colorado, a place I have called home for 14 years, experienced a flood of colossal proportions. In the aftermath following the unfathomable volume of water, the places I frequented were virtually unrecognizable and every aspect of normal life in these areas shifted. The canyons were scraped clean and the rivers now flowed in new patterns. Domestic belongings were in the higher elevations of treetops. Splinters of furniture and shreds of clothing were embedded in and along the riverside, creating collections of kitchens and living rooms in the form of dams. These images of the debris and destruction, of domesticity scattered in and around at the whim of water are hauntingly strange representations of daily life.

 In visiting these uncanny new landscapes of the riverbeds, I collected pieces of shattered furniture from banks and dams. I found splinters of the archetypal porch chair — the only connecting element being its forest green paint; a nightstand scrapped of its finish, missing a leg and drawer with the remaining parts hanging together with bent screws. Instead of marks of the quotidian, these objects carry the scars of the aberrant. In this work I want to give these pieces of furniture a new life by restoring the broken and lost parts, dressing their wounds, returning function in a ghostly way through the use of raw unfired paper clay, wax and other materials. The unfired paper clay would easily dissolve in a rain; the wax would warp and move with the heat of a summer day. Though the materials echo that of impermanence, the work is meant to be a respectful act of care and renewal, of being found.

I found the small card with the piece’s namesake in a dam of debris just 10-15 ft upstream from the found parts of the nightstand.