I re-purpose the discarded. Responding to the waste and urgency of contemporary times, I find value in re-working manufactured objects. As a society, we are trained to believe that it is easier to replace something than it is to repair it. Re-working and ‘repairing’ the industrial object by hand is the way I customize an otherwise generic and ubiquitous thing.
What we desire in a repair is the illusion that nothing ever happened. But, the cost of the illusion conceals the process of the repair—the evidence of interaction. The restored object is an artifact of collaboration between the industry and the individual.
This body of work focuses on my process of repair and customization. I expose the renovation of a once discarded object by highlighting functional and aesthetic hybridity. Challenging the viewer’s disdain for the obsolete, I reveal the human hand in the work – always falling short of mechanized perfection. In an age of generic, anonymous, machine-made objects, these revamped objects are imbued with importance; they reveal the value of the handmade, human labor of the individual.