Portfolio
List of Works
User Interface_0 (2025)
Untitled, For Bud (2024)
Ritual (2023-2024)
Cube 1 (2022)
Wrenches (2012)
Arc Furnace (2012)
Near Enough is Close Enough (2012)
Spinning Wheel (2011)
Pregnant Man (2011)
User Interface_0
(2025) Cast Iron, Brass, Enamel
Cast at the CSCIA Iron Pour 2024
User Interface_0 is the first of a series, in development, that draws connections between digital tools and their physical ancestors. This series is an attempt to isolate the portion of the tool designed to interface with the user and present it as an object to be considered. By titling the work User Interface I aim to bring the viewer’s thoughts to computers and computer programs, a context in which we most commonly hear that term, and re-frame computers and their programs as tools like a saw or a hammer.
Untitled, For Bud
(2024) Hand Saw (Steel, Wood, Brass)
My Grandfather taught me how to paint. We’d use the dollar store acrylic paints, and used the lid from a margarine container as a palette. Our canvas was hand saws. My grandfather would paint quaint farm scenes, countrysides, and placesfrom his memories on all kinds of saws. I wanted to paint dinosaurs and rocketships. We sat together at the kitchen table painting our saws until it was time to wash up for dinner. He was pretty good too. He sold a number of them at craft shows, and there’s more than a few of them hanging on the walls of my living room. Growing up I was very close with my grandfather. Living in what used to be my grandparent’s house means I’m constantly reminded of things I’d long forgotten. When I came out to my grandparents, I was surprised at their understanding, but my transition had also made me self conscious. The relationship had changed. The love was still there and w were very much still family, but I felt different and guarded. We had grown apart. Coming out is like that a lot: you change the relationship in a fundamental way; things aren’t different, but they are. You’re the same person, yet a different person. In the best cases, things carry on like they always had. In others, they end completely. Somehow the worst cases are the ones in between. You become acquaintances with people you love the most.
Ritual
(2023-2024) Plywood, Resin, Spraypaint
Ritual is an exploration of building identity through fragments of repeated action. The pattern is a double star quilt block rendered in 3 dimensions, cast in resin 24 times, assembled then painted. The tradition of quilting is a highly ritualistic act; a specific set of steps are followed and repeated to build an object of significance out of otherwise discarded fabric.
I first became fascinated with quilts as a concept when I underwent gender confirmation surgery. Before the surgery, I had expected that I would feel completeness, as if a major chapter in my transition had reached its conclusion. During my recovery, I felt relieved and happy and a whole host of positive feelings, but at the same time, there was a lack of finality. The occasion had come and gone and felt unmarked. I didn’t feel any more or less of a woman than I had before. I began to research coming-of-age and womanhood rituals and learned of the strong tradition in western history of women making quilts to mark milestones.
This work is one of a number of others titled Ritual, all using the language of quilting. Each work cements a small piece of my own ritual of becoming—taking the fragments of lived experience, combining them through a ritual of creating identity, and defining what womanhood and femininity mean to me.
Cube 1
(2022) Cast Iron
Cast at the CSCIA iron pour 2021
Cube 1 is a cast iron form consisting of 3 contiguous sides of a cube, and a concave in place of the other 3 sides. It is an exploration of perception and identity. You can only see 3 sides of a cube at the same time, our mind extrapolates the rest of the cube. It’s only by moving around the piece that the viewer gathers more information and learns its true form. The form was designed digitally, with the concave specifically made to accentuate the sharp edges and triangular faces of low resolution digital shapes. The intention is to mirror how we create digital identities that we share through social media. Those identities are partial versions of ourselves that we want others to see. The inverse is also true. We build a mental identity of the people we see online, based on the curated information we’re presented. The entirety of the person—the truth of who they are—is obscured.
Wrenches
(2012) Bronze, Black Walnut, Aluminum
Cast at the OCAD University Foundry
Wrenches shows the deterioration of a tool into a concept as it becomes more digital. A wrench as a tool in a physical reality exists as a form with function, an object with purpose. That function alludes to a user. A person to wield the wrench and use it for it’s designated, or some undesignated, purpose. When that wrench is scanned, and reproduced in a virtual reality, it looses that function. It becomes the signified. It is the concept of a wrench.
Arc Furnace
(2012) Steel, Refractory, Graphite Electrodes, Oak, Insulated Copper Electrical Leads
Arc Furnace is a theoretically functional Electric Arc Furnace (EAF). EAFs are used in the recycling and production of steel. In my home town, there is an old steel mill. It looms over the city of Welland’s east end. As a child I always wondered what went on in those big metal buildings. As it turns out, when I was a child, nothing went on in there. The mill was empty. Shut down due to mismanagement and low steel prices. It wasn’t until my late teens that I learned about the Atlas Steels Company, and the marvelous machines they used to create steel. Industrial processes are a wonder to behold, and they’re often something taken for granted, especially with something as ubiquitous as steel.
After my undergrad, I served as a millwright apprentice for a few years and had an opportunity to work in steel mills performing maintenance. The awe when a 2 ton billet of orange hot steel hits the rolling mill never went away.
Near Enough is Close Enough
(2012) Maple
I was working in the shop with a machinist’s square. I knocked the square off the table and on to the ground. I picked up the square and worried that the blade may have been knocked out of square. I then found another square to check how square the recently dropped square was. It then occurred to me that the second square might have been dropped as well.
A machinist’s square will will come with some indicator of how accurate it is, or conversely how inaccurate it is. The geometric constants we use as reference—flat, level, square, plumb, etc.—are all impossible in a physical form. In essence to exist is to be imperfect. To reflect this I have constructed nine squares in raw maple and displayed them on an untreated plank of maple. The untreated wood absorbs atmospheric humidity. It then warps and shifts, making the squares visibly un-square, resting on a twisted shelf. Nine squares in this formation allow the viewer to check how square the squares are with other squares.
Spinning Wheel
(2011) Steel, Aluminum, Rubber Belt, Steel Wool
When I was a little boy, my sister played hockey. She was good, so we travelled around a lot. I spent a lot of time in hockey arenas. I met a mother of one of the players in the stands. She was needlepointing. I was interested so I asked her about it. She let me try, and showed me how to do it. The next game she brought me a needle point hoop and I sat there needlepointing for the whole game. Of course, my sister and her teammates laughed at me. My love of craft never faded. I’ve knit, sewn, and spun yarn. For all of those hobbies, I was often the only straight man (or so I though). Spinning Wheel Juxtaposes the acceptably “masculine” with the traditionally “feminine” in an act of defiance, trying to make it okay for men to partake in craft.
Pregnant Man
(2011) Bronze
Cast in my home foundry
Pregnant Man presents as a pregnancy idol, reflecting my own struggles with body dysphoria and wanting to occupy a maternal role and bear children of my own. For this work I built my own furnace capable of melting bronze and made the ceramic shell in my parents’ garage. This was the first piece I cast with my own equipment.