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An annual, nine-day art competition and exhibition in Lake City, South Carolina, ArtFields awards over $100,000 in cash prizes to artists from across the Southeast. The event also has infused new energy, creativity, and growth into Lake City and its surrounding communities. ArtFields is the flagship art event in a town where an abundance of high-quality art is on view all year long. Aside from a growing collection of public art, the city has several exhibitions running at all times in professional art spaces such as Jones-Carter Gallery and TRAX Visual Art Center. More new art venues, including a sculpture garden, are on the horizon.
Through sculpture and assemblage, my work explores the array of complexities experienced by individuals within the gay community. I create work to reveal internal and external resentments with a variety of mediums and symbolism. As a tribute and a memoir, my practice touches on feelings that resonate personally and universally. I hope for viewers to engage with the work emotionally, and to question their own similar or dissimilar experiences. My work is merely a glimpse into the often unknown or unrecognized struggles of being gay.
I am a interdisciplinary visual artist from Finland. My work focuses on themes of time, memory, and human experience. I draw inspiration from my personal history and observations.
My work stems from the loss of both my mother and father due to smoking related cancers in February of 2013. Their passing left a deep void in my life that led to my interest in Memento Mori, or the act of coming to terms with ones own mortality. Through this investigation I came to terms with the trauma of my childhood and the lack of memories I actually have.
I discovered wire the day I made my first wire face. So for me wire and faces are inseparable, like taste to the tongue. I'm not a portrait artist; my work is less about the subject than it is about the very act of creation. I speak only in wire, and faces are my language. But how to explain the longevity of my artistic project now in its twenty eighth year? It's because the reward keeps increasing with every sculpture. Wire, the most innocuous item found in the back of every junk drawer, is a medium with potential that has only barely been tapped. With every new sculpture I'm building on my discoveries from the last sculpture. "Luminous," my latest creation, represents my most honest attempt at taking a thing of no significance, and working it till it moves the viewer. Somehow by humanizing a medium that is so easily discarded, I feel a closer connection to my fellows, as in prayer. I leave the studio with a deep sense of our collective humanity and a profound feeling of optimism.