I am a magpie like my mothers before me.
To me, the creature has become one of folk tale more than reality — a corvid drawn to shiny things, memorizing faces, enacting revenge, and collecting artifacts of interest. Just as birds build nests from the items they’ve amassed, I too create a landscape of discarded objects within my memory. The landscape takes the shape of a collection, where each item calls to a fragment of my past, whether in the people I’ve known or through the unplaceable moments I find myself returning.

Within this body of work, memories have been reconstructed into decoration. Family history and its impact on my identity are reflected in wooden sculptures, whose uses echo our legacy of hunting and fishing. Decoys are no longer bound by practicality or function, existing outside of utilitarian tradition and instead representative of my lineage. I connect with these histories in my own right through this material and practical heritage. My memories of these species are manifested as perfect forms fundamentally different from their original states. Simplification and geometry preserve the featured plants and animals in a static, idealized style suspended between reality and my own fiction. By reimagining their forms the reality of memory is materialized as both potentially false yet unchanging.

My heritage is made manifest by way of collecting — the ritual of hoarding itself is as crucial to my identity as the objects amassed. Items fallen into disuse are celebrated through their presentation and their curation cements the ways in which I intentionally remember. Wilted flowers from childhood bloom again and remain vibrant, birds are perpetually in flight but remain close enough to admire, my own hoard is validated and the discarded becomes beautiful, suspended in time.

Here I present the landscape of my memory in all of its clutter and glory.