Like the body, my sculptures are vulnerable to time; they sweat, bleed, feed scratch, pump, break down, retain and transform. An amputated dining table regenerates around its copper gilded stumps. A bed frame cast entirely out of dust defiantly stands perspiring against the wall. Porcelain pillows peacefully glow with light on oil, as the viewer controls the incessant churning of the slip pump, a near death state when someone is waiting to see a missing relative before they pass on. Subjected to faint yet ceaseless erosion, all these works exhibit unexpected strength, perseverance, and resistance.

Trash, props, tools, souvenirs, and antiques all have different ownership and different ghosts.  My document work examines surfaces of objects to reveal their histories and narratives, including present time.  

A series of photographs documents the surfaces of cutting boards from a Zen Monastery, elevating an ordinary domestic tool to a collective sacred object.  

In the series Rental Props, the surfaces of rented bronzed baby shoes and antique irons reveal monuments to anonymous individuals, couched in the social arenas of nostalgia, advertising, and preserved value.  

In my most recent series, found embroideries are displayed from the back side, exposing the knots and cross stitching of the unconscious hand.  These works were inspired by Dubuffet’s collection of abstract embroideries from mentally ill patients; I was interested in the similarity of form with domestic embroideries on the side intended to be hidden.  

My studio practice is interdisciplinary and seeks a balance between works that are personal and those that are activist in nature or done in service to communities. I am interested in how material objects and physical sites suspend, retain, age, corrode, or transmute over time, imbedding cultural and collective psychologies, values, histories, fiction, and activism. I externalize anxieties with our current political landscape through exploring my own peripheral attention and dream states that mirror cultural trauma and in public works that engage in the amplification of voices of those who are marginalized.

My intersectional identities of mixed race, queerness, and class are integrated and imbedded in the work. I am questioning the schism of personal and collective values and the psychological impact of slow erosions, like classism or invisibility. The ghosts we keep around and what we protect are evidenced in objects, actions, and in the stories we tell ourselves. Unexpected beauty, the emergence of the sacred object, the retelling of the narratives—these are tools of transformation and much of my work’s conceptual underpinnings.

Various public art projects engage directly with teaching, activism, and community groups, such as the residency at the Portland Children’s Museum, The Creative Center for Women Living with Cancer, and my 10 year entrepreneurship- Jennie Greene Designs, a floral design studio built from a shipping container.

My curatorial project Remaking the Monument: The Immigrant Story at Bush House Museum was open in June and July of 2022 at the Salem Arts Association Bush House Museum. This exhibition celebrates the extraordinary lives of immigrants and refugees living in Oregon today. Their presence in the museum brings new meaning to rooms haunted by the racist rhetoric and actions of Bush and other advocates of the exclusionary laws that define early Oregon history. They hold our gaze with strength and compassion, occupying spaces where differences were not allowed, where racism was fierce, and where abolitionists were disparaged, Their possessions challenge the notion of historical preservation. Their stories rouse our deepest stirrings of the American Dream. They inspire us by healing and leading communities and breaking glass ceilings.