What and Why

I make art works (mostly sculpture, but also installations, photography, and jewelry) that incorporate and contemplate the material world around us - how humankind inhabits and examines our planet. I choose to work with recycled and found materials because they reflect the substance of our everyday lives - what we shed or discard that once was part of our daily lives.

I create interactive projects and installations that ask audiences to contemplate how they inhabit their world, either through Weigh Your Words, an examination of identity through interaction with words on stones, or through Bycatch, a series of large sculptures that serve as portraits of coastal communities threatened by rising waters due to climate change. The Bycatch project also includes a series of photographs of collages of beach detritus - snapshots of a littered beach rearranged into a reflection on the affected human or marine communities through which the garbage is passing.

In a related series of sculptures (mostly birds), I transform used "everyday" materials such as toilet paper rolls and packaging papers (wrappers, packets, newspaper) into quirky examinations of what our culture values and what it discards. 

This website showcases my work with common materials, including a blog about ongoing projects and short-term explorations. There is a gallery of many of the birds I have made in the Recycled Bird series, as well as a shop with birds currently available for sale.

I keep an Instagram account (@materialworldstudio) to complement this site - posting images of vignettes and scenes related to this work, as well as notices about exhibitions and events. The most recent feed from that account is posted below. 

A new supply of spiral notebooks, sourced from a Buy Nothing exchange and passed on to me by the lovely folks at Galway Sustainable Capital for their commissioned installation. This is how we do it! Freeshare, reuse, recycle, transform, inspire. Rea
The beginning of a little basket with cattail spokes and banana and cattail cordage (so far). We'll see how this one ends up. Cordage I can practically make in my sleep. Weaving a satisfying form and coordinating the tension and keeping the materials
Ahhh, rose stems yield lovely fiber! #basketry #rosestems #foragedfibers #thorny #wastenot #beyondgarbageproject
Bee butt (Anthidium) spotted on foxglove at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. #lookaroundyoumightseesomething #bees @coastalmainebotanicalgardens #daytrip #coastalmaine
While I'm weeding through my vast collect of found papers, getting rid of lots of "extra" stuff in an effort to reduce the sheer bulk of it, I still can't resist sweet packaging like this. Slowly working my way up to a bee-themed recycled b
Spent a very gratifying afternoon playing with "new" birch bark from this morning's surprise acquisition. I decided to start with a classic form loosely based on a Penobscot basket (fitting, since I am on the Penobscot Bay). I had hemp twin
Foraging uses all the senses. Today, I used my ears. I was thinking yesterday that I should finally get around to working with the bits of foraged birch bark I've found over the past few weeks and started soaking some of them. Then, breaking the calm
Musings about materials and process. Paper. I use many kinds of paper to make my recycled birds. Toilet paper rolls, packaging cardboard, and used postcards (with masking tape) make up most basic armatures and found/used decorative papers finish the
Philosophy alert! Feet. I've gotten pretty good at making matched wire feet for my recycled birds, but they are one of the trickiest parts of the process. When I find myself obsessing about making the feet look perfectly matched, I have to check my
More treasures from Sandy’s garden: huge, stemmy rhubarb. I have a huge crush on this vegetable, from the pies and compote one can make with it to the pink-tinted cordage its incredibly strong outer skin creates. This Sears Island stone seems t
Intertwined overgrown parsley cordage on quartz rock found on Sears Island. Deep gratitude to my friend Sandy, whose somewhat haphazard approach to gardening let her parsley grow to 4 feet tall, yielding fiber I could more easily twine into cordage.
Not quite a beret, but I like it! Swipe for top view and deflated profile. #knittedhat #mosaicstitch #finished #okwhatsnext

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