I have been examining the brick as a subject in my work on and off since early 2015. For the most recent pieces in this body of work, I revisited the beginning of my study of the brick form, dozens of watercolor paintings of bricks that I created as an exercise in giving individuality and nuance to a mass-produced object. I reworked photographs of the paintings, editing sections and adjusting the color palettes. I also manipulated the perspective of the image, splitting it into planes that would allow me to turn the two-dimensional brick images into three-dimensional brick objects. The final images were printed on a soft and fluffy minky fabric that I wrapped around and mounted to a block of wood which was carefully cut to match the dimensions of the image. This process resulted in a fully dimensional object that looks like an intact brick when viewed at a specific vantage point, but, if viewed from any other angle, the object reveals the less-than-true trickery of the image. I left the bottom, back, and right side of the bricks white and vacant, so the skewed falseness of the brick image overwhelms the actual dimensionality of the brick object.

As I worked on the watercolor paintings that became the foundation of this body of work, I thought about the multitude of things a brick can represent, the connotations of different types of labor, the nuances of industry as an idea, and the different levels of value assigned to objects based on how they are produced. As I considered these themes, I began to create bricks as cross-stitched embroideries which I mounted to thin panels that I had cut to the contour shape of the brick. These embroidered bricks appear to hover when hung on the wall, and they cast a bit of a shadow, hinting at their status as objects as well as images. As the work continued to become more and more three-dimensional, and the images began to take the role of skin, I also considered the tenuousness of appearances and facades.

The more I engaged with this subject matter, the more I realized how both basic and complex a brick can be. Bricks represent both simplicity and multiplicity. They hold both history and possibility. And when depicted with bright washes of color that fade into oblivion, my bricks evoke ideas concerning awareness, solidity, and lasting presence.