My artistic practice revolves around two key arenas: visual art that explores ideas and metaphors derived from environmental philosophy, and ecocritical research and writing as applied to contemporary ceramics. Each arena informs the other: they are held together by the connective threads of materialism, an examination of systems and relations, and a broader interrogation of ecological values and meanings.

Now here we have the mining man, in either hand a gun.
He’s not afraid of anything, and he’s never known to run.
He dearly loves his whiskey, and he dearly loves his beer, 
He’s a shooting, fighting, dynamiting, mining engineer!

Colorado School of Mines, “The Mining Engineer”

The law locks up the man or woman 
Who steals the goose from off the common 
But leaves the greater villain loose 
Who steals the common from off the goose. 

The law locks up the man or woman 
Who steals the goose from off the common 
And geese will still a common lack 
Till they go and steal it back!

Anonymous, “The Goose and the Common”

The Collar and the Yoke

Statement

Since I arrived in Montana in August, 2024, I have been working on a project about yokes and collars as visual metaphors, with ties to labor, land, power, capitalism, and disparate energy regimes. 

This project grew out of my fascination with the term “copper collar,” an early 20th century pejorative lodged at Montana politicians said to be in the pocket of big copper. It is hard to overstate the power and legacy of this industry in Montana, in the United States, and in other parts of the world. Spurred by the push for electrification, and aided by the invention of largescale explosives, industrial copper mining in the 19th and 20th centuries helped inaugurate a new technological and environmental age. It also created a chain of wealth disparities and ecological disasters that stretched from Butte, Montana to Calama, Chile. Both Ayn Rand and Che Guevara, two cultural economic icons of the 20th century, saw in the Anaconda Copper Company an emblem of their political vision.  

The breadth of meanings and relationships contained in this history is difficult to express in succinct terms. Needless to say, I was taken by this phrase—copper collar—and the ideas of labor, control, and power that a collar represents. It made me think about what the neck, and its artifacts, symbolize. I thought about the yoke, preeminent tool of a neck in submission, and the competing agricultural economies of western Montana. The yoke is the literal harnessing of the power of another and, along with the electrification of the copper collar, represents its own energetic regime. Through these symbols, I have been thinking about how constriction, enclosure, and economy are inscribed both on the body and on the land. The collar and the yoke, the fence and the razor wire: each is suggestive of degrees of freedom and unfreedom, possession and privation, movement and its impediment.   

Boundaries, with their imagined contours, are a common theme in ecological thought and epistemology—a field premised on the lack of separation between things. When I visited the Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh, PA, I was struck by the way the center talked about captivity. Captivity—enclosure of the body—marks the onset of postnatural relations. This idea has stayed with me ever since. 
 
My instinct is usually to remove as much of myself from my visual art, to stress my own narrative insignificance. But lately, through this project, I have been thinking about my own relationship to these things: my relationship to land, economy, labor. Particularly as a middle-class urbanite in the academic arts, so-called “freedom” of movement is expected of me, is considered a privilege and an “opportunity.” At the same time, as far as I can tell, there is no living memory in my family of a close tie to land and place. In many ways, this uprootedness is part of the legacy of cities, land enclosure, and privatization—itself a seminal moment in the development of capitalism. 
 
It is not lost on me that both the collar and the yoke are also spiritual symbols—signs of submission and obedience to a power. Each elicits a particular posture: a body erect, a body bending over. I say this not to romanticize these objects and symbols, but to underscore ambiguity, my own searching amidst uncertain signs. 

To view my recent article “Writerly Ceramics and Metabolic Rift” in the March, 2025 issue of Ceramics Monthly, please click here.

To view a past artist statement for She Who Vomited Out Her Own Metals, please click here.

To view a past artist statement for the NATURE TO THE DOGS and Conditional Presence exhibition, please click here.