I started by breaking things.

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As a child I took mechanical toys apart and tried to put them back together. The pieces never quite added up. There were always fewer in the reconstructed toy than in the original, and a strange new buzzing somewhere inside. The limping robot that came out the other end looked, to me, much more alive than the slick one I had started with.

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I wasn't reassembling. I was repurposing — and the toys were quietly offering up other versions of themselves. Every object I played with became a building block for another. The thing it was designed to be was only one of the things it could be.

Later it was cutlery. Spoons and forks became the vocabulary for sculpture, joined by a technique I worked out as I went. Later still, full mechanisms — taking them apart, interfering with them, exposing their flaws. The same questions kept circling back: why should an object be only its function? When something is given a purpose, are its other qualities suppressed? Where do those qualities go?

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A working machine is invisible. A failing one is suddenly a creature. We watch it struggle and we recognize ourselves — the getting stuck, the trying again, the wanting to advance. Empathy arrives the moment the mechanism falters. That faltering is where I work.

Most of what I make begins as a mistake I decided to keep. A wrong connection that turned out to be more interesting than the one I planned. A motor straining against something it wasn't meant to move. The work happens on the seam between possibility and the slightly absurd — and most of it is already inside the objects.

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