I’m drawn to objects that carry a sense of history—things that have been used, handled, valued, displayed, or lived with over time. I’m fascinated by the way objects are imbued with meaning. Through use, ritual, memory, preservation, or devotion, an object can become more than the material from which it was made and become precious, ceremonial, or sacred.  For me, collecting interesting objects and making have become part of the same pursuit: recognizing meaning in objects that already exist and making new objects capable of carrying meaning of their own. As a maker, I’m interested in how an object might participate in that same process—how it can become a vessel for meaning, reverence, memory, or devotion.

My work brings together languages that aren’t always expected to occupy the same space: religious imagery, historical ceramic forms, idealized male bodies, erotic desire, ornament, and humor. I’m interested in what happens when gazing at a beautiful body begins to resemble reverence—and when reverence begins to resemble desire.

Language complicates that relationship. When a work says REPENT, who is speaking? When it says OBEY, who is meant to be obeyed? “On Your Knees Boy” can suggest falling to one’s knees in worship while simultaneously functioning as an erotic command. I’m interested in allowing both readings to remain available.

Increasingly, I also use sweetness—bunnies, puppies, flowers, cherubs, and pastel colors—to destabilize authority. A bunny doesn’t argue with authority or destroy it; it simply changes the emotional temperature of the object.

That connects to a larger question in my work: who and what have been considered worthy of reverence, preservation, and display? For much of my life, I understood myself as an outsider looking into histories and traditions in which people like me were largely absent—or, when present, often condemned or demonized. I don’t want to tear the table apart. I’m more interested in setting it differently: making a place for histories, bodies, desires, and experiences that were left out. I want to keep the beauty, ornament, ceremony, and history of the traditions I’ve inherited while reconsidering what—and who—they are capable of holding.

My experience as a gay man inevitably informs this work, but I don’t believe there is a singular queer experience. My identity as a gay man and my identity as a Midwesterner developed together. Queer lives here can be complicated, rich, pleasurable, creative, and deeply rooted rather than understood only through repression, survival, or escape.

I’m interested in making work that could only have come from the particular life I’ve lived—work that asks who gets a place at the table, whose stories are preserved, what gets treated as precious, and what we decide is worthy of our attention, desire, preservation, and reverence.