I create imaginary but palpable spatial worlds in which figures from found and altered photos enact their narratives. Their scale conforms to the studio tabletop I use as a base, with unfired, quickly-shaped clay forming the ground, backdrop and other elements of the vignettes. Other objects, such as miniature 3-D furniture or cast-clay vehicles, serve as props and stands for the figures who often gaze directly at their audience from center-stage with an awkward dignity. After these scenes are photographed, Photoshopped and printed, layers of transparent paint add color and atmosphere to their world.

I often source images of people on eBay, choosing them for some ineffable quality that speaks to me through a pose, an accessory, or a particular facial characteristic. I then create amalgams of fragments of these images, collaging elements together and distorting them by elongating and enlarging some body parts, combining people of different ages and time periods, or altering their costumes. They resemble surrealist paper dolls in perpetual flux, and they possess a simultaneously humorous and vulnerable humanity that prevents them from being objects of nostalgia.

In addition to the photos of anonymous people taken by amateurs, my cultural sources come from publicly-known works. Some of these are popular productions like the original “Frosty the Snowman” animation from the 1950s; I’ve isolated trees drawn for that cartoon and pasted them into my backgrounds. Working with clay, I’ve translated landscapes from paintings by artists such as Marsden Hartley and Thomas Hart Benton into sculpted backdrops for my work. And though I trained as a sculptor, In my work, I hope that the people I have depicted, in their altered states and fresh milieux, have been given the prospect of a new life. They wait, as we all must, to see what will happen next in the arena they have been allotted.