Art makes tangible what is difficult to express, creating a link between moments in time, space and place. It helps illuminate the crux of a problem, the significance of a moment, the essence of our endeavors. It has the potential to communicate emotive qualities that cannot be understood in any other way. As a tool it has the ability to generate, bridge and extinguish conflicts in intellect, opinion, and felt response. A concrete definition could be exhaustively pursued and never found, for art is many things to many people and responds to the influences of place, community and time.

It is in its ever-changing state that its true nature is visible. Art is all things through which we experience life, yet it does not have to be anything. Our state of being is reflected in our visual, verbal, thoughtful expressions and reflections. How we choose to engage in our human relationships and construct meaning from them, what issues we choose to engage in, the policymakers we try to persuade, the friends we share with and inform, and the communication we strive for, with, and through one another manifests itself as art. The decisions we make in response to these higher calls have great potential to inspire, educate and facilitate social change. How we choose to respond creates artistic diversity or reveals a need or longing for artistic rejuvenation.

My artistic pursuits answer to a desire for change and evolution. I feel a climactic pause in our collective unconscious and I am eager to press the inevitable. The complexity of the arts creates a dilemma for the individual - a dilemma I am prepared to engage. My interests and pursuits straddle many spheres of knowledge and experience, learning and the yet unknown. I see no value in disconnecting the links, found or metaphorical, between lived experience and pursued knowledge, between work and play, between love and struggle. It is the contradictions and the conflicts, the static and the scratches that rip holes in what I have come to know or thought I knew to render new possibilities and endless questions.

The holes are hopeful and make visible darkened doorways, bridges and passages to new realms of exploration. The journey between here and there will lift the perpetual haze and lay bare the complex intersection of art, culture and society. Honing our perceptions and learning to recognize these moments of stranded clarity is precious. This is when I feel the most whole, grounded and safe in my understanding and awareness of art in self.