Artist statement:

 

We are only a speck in the cosmos, but to us, it feels like we are the whole world. In our day to day we forget that the inevitable will meet us at the end.

 

We look to the stars and we wonder what lies above us in the vast expanse of space. We are natural explorers, curious, wanting to know more than we are allowed. Why are we here? Is there anyone else out there? Can we reach the stars in our lifetime?

 

In the past and even now we have made strides, towards touching ground not walked on before, towards seeing things we can only imagine in fiction, and promising a more exciting future. But we have not seen a fraction of what is out there. We have barely reached the depths of our oceans, seen the "aliens" that lay beneath the pressures of earth's waters.

 

Will what we find above us be friend or beast? 

 

We wonder if there even is anything else out there. If there was, why would our paths not have intersected by now? But the universe is expanding with every second, and there comes a point in space where no matter how hard we try, we will never reach it. Perhaps what is out there is just too far away to meet. And we will never know if what was there would have changed us for the better or for the worst.

 

You and I will likely be gone when humanity meets face to face with those beyond our stars. We are cosmically insignificant, a speck within the chaos of the universe, stuck wondering and imagining, instead of seeing and understanding. We can distract ourselves with entertainment, but a part of us will always still wonder why we exist, why we are here, and if we will ever know before we die.

 

My work comes at the junction between that feeling of inconsequence and the acknowledgement of our own mortality. It allows us to feel our fear, our discontent, frustration, sadness, anger, pain. It reminds us that these feelings are only human, and that, while we may not know why we function, the point is that we do. That death will come for all of us, whether we are ready for it or not. Whether we have seen all we wanted to, all we hoped for, all we imagined of, or whether we have wasted our life wondering why we were born too early to find the answers.

 

We may always have an emptiness inside that we try to fill by creating our own answers to the existential questions, and to most that is enough. 

 

My work is a reminder of mankind's need to know. To explore where we haven't been, to see what we've never seen, touch ground we've never touched, and to understand our place amongst the stars, even if we never will.