Past Winners

Anna was determined to read, she secretly learned from a boy who visited her on Sunday afternoons. He wrote letters in the sand with a stick. “Why do you want to read?” he curiously asked. At first Anna shrugged, then she folded her arms. "I want to read myself free," voiced Anna.

Started in early February of 2020, this piece was originally a playful critique of decadence and capitalism; a Wesselmann vibe if Wesselmann was a 12-year-old girl with her 20-something-year-old aunt hanging pool side at her west central Georgia apartment complex in the late ‘80s. A few weeks into the piece, all restaurants in the country shut down due to COVID and I lost my job of two decades as a diner waitress. So did everyone I worked with. The shock was so severe that I couldn’t face a piece so playful. I longed for decadence, finding no fun in critiquing it. The piece sat half-finished for six months. Once I could work on it again, protests were active across the country and fires had engulfed American cities. I added the row of marchers and was able the complete the piece with that ever-lasting, hot and rebellious American energy in mind.

The bedrock of my artwork is rediscovering worth in the broken, overlooked and forgotten. While bringing found objects together, I build a whole that is greater than any single fragment, creating connection and warmth in a world typically cold and divided.

I strive to create a warning to the human race that we are liable for our own actions, including those which affect the world we live in. Long after we are gone, nature will not only thrive, but consume the ruins of human existence to spawn new ecosystems for the evolution of a multitude of burgeoning life forms. Living on Earth is analogous to renting an apartment, if we are bad tenants and disrespect someone else's property, the landlord will eventually evict us. Mother Nature, God, or any other concept one may have as the ruling entity of the structure of life as we know it could be thought of as this proprietor. That being said, how can we possibly expect anything other than eviction with the way we are treating another's property? Nature will always and quickly find a better tenant once it has a vacant residence. Humans will be the sole entities who will rightfully pay the price if we do not do everything possible to curtail the damage we impart on our terrestrial home.

In February of 2013, I lost both my mother and father two weeks apart from each other to smoking-related cancers. It was a devastating time in my life, but I channeled my grief into the conceptual ideas of my work. Cancer is a disease that is a perfectly structured killer; it is beautiful in its architecture but grotesque in its eventuality. I began to think about nostalgia, longing for a childhood I never had, and parents that I needed. My recent work is an exploration of the escapisms I used as a child to escape my everyday reality. I repurpose retro-pop culture VHS from my childhood to re-envision the movies and fiction that became my surrogate parents and allowed me to find order from my chaos, beauty from destruction, and hope for more joyous times.

At the intersection between generations, things are lost. Domestic items lose their potency in daily life, and rarely are objects created, manufactured, or bought with intentions to spend a quality amount of time with them, care for them, and pass them along to younger generations. The work I create is a reaction to this reality. Contemporary society is consumed with disposability, and people are no longer connected to the objects that aid in their sustenance. Making objects formed with touch, labor, and time, imbued with value and worth counterpoints this disposability—the objects I create patiently wait to be discovered and enjoyed, retained, and later passed on to others.

In 2014, my wife spent nine months in West Africa on the front lines of the Ebola response. She lead a surveillance team trying to identify “contacts,” who are persons who may have come into contact with an infected person. The man in this painting was among these “contacts.” He and several others from a small village in rural Sierra Leone had direct contact with a boy who became infected with Ebola and died. He knew the boy since his birth and wrapped the boy’s body before burial. This is the moment when he learned that his act of love and respect put him in danger of Ebola. This is the moment when he learned that he was now a “contact,” and for the next 21 days, a stranger would visit him each day to look for signs of the disease that had already killed thousands in his country. This is Contact Tracing and one of the most critical elements to stem the tide of an epidemic.

I build worlds from the most common and least known material: paper. The ritual of hand papermaking is ancient, scientific, and rhythmic. I merge this science with the unknown by air-drying my pieces: the paper shrinks, twists and cockles, forming three-dimensional shapes more subtle than I could design. My paper forms revert to their botanical origins; I make plants from plants. Oversized and immersive, diminutive and whimsical, my pieces dilate the natural world and bring it inside.