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Statement

Using salvaged plaster lath, the wooden strips embedded in the construction of walls of old houses, I create two and three dimensional sculptures and installations that explore the structural vernacular of our built environment and how we perceive it. Through the rules and methods of technical drawing and the vantage points of architectural model building I pursue concepts of mass, weight and space via material that has little integrity on it’s own.

Plaster lath is typically a nail ridden, jagged, splintery tangle sticking out of a dumpster, the discarded by-product of home renovation. Yet once separated, each piece clearly carries it’s own history. Various types of wood used in different parts of a house yield a myriad of variations in color, texture and thickness. I exploit these qualities in my own systematic repurposing as light, shadow and surface variations.

As the lath was originally used within walls it formed parallel rows of structure, in effect a rough sketch of a plane, a drawing in space; a wall. Our basic concepts of space are measured and rendered first as drawings in a graphic short hand that eventually expresses time and material consequences. The built environment is a crystalline composite of all these different intersecting ideas dimensioned to fit together but individually assembled from specific economic vectors each with its own lifespan.

From the tangled mess I impose a new hierarchy of rigid alignment that adheres to the perspective-less view of an isometric drawing where the illusion of three dimensions is compressed into two, flat on the wall. These are oblique, reverse-engineered structural meditations distilled from the lath itself; the subconscious legacy of the material revealed.