Fighting is an appetite we are all born with, and it is so constant that we stop seeing it, the way we stop seeing gravity. A baby fighting to be born, an argument with yourself at midnight over whether to open the fridge, two countries at war: the same appetite at different volumes. My work is about that appetite, and about the fact that somebody is always paying for where we stand with it, usually somebody who had no part in choosing.
I have taught martial arts for twenty years. That is where the subject comes from, and it is why I treat fighting as innate rather than aberrant. It cannot be removed from a person, only refined, and it cannot be refined alone. A person needs someone to extend toward and retrieve from, over and over, before anything is refined at all.
Refinement is the path between fighting others for ourselves and fighting ourselves for others. It is walked in both directions for a lifetime and never arrived at. Standing still at either end has a price. Pointed only at yourself, the refining stops and a stranger pays. Pointed only at other people, the price lands on the ones closest to you.
I make participatory sculpture and layered portraiture that finds fighting where nobody calls it fighting, and puts the viewer in a position where they have to find themselves inside it. The cost was always being paid. What the work changes is who can see it.