I have designed with light for over fifteen years, in theater, film, and live performance. My designs often feature illuminated pieces as central components to the scenic designs themselves. Historically my process was largely collaborative and work temporary, this body represents my first solo work creating permanent artifacts.

Over the past two years I’ve studied and worked with neon but always felt my pieces were somehow incomplete until early last year when I was introduced to the process of stone carving. There was an immediate connection for me and ever since I have been drawn to explore the tension and interplay between these two mediums.

Neon allows the creation of custom light source shapes out of organic materials – glass and noble gas – that illuminate and reveal the inner beauty of the stone as well as emitting their own ethereal light. Similarly, the linear nature of the tubes accentuates and contrasts the geometries of the stone forms. As such, my pieces are a study in form, materiality, and process.

The current Monolith Series references cinematic forms in sci-fi narratives – think the opening scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey – while also pulling from the neon aesthetic in the scenic designs of Blade Runner and Tron.  I’ve observed a renewed interest in these motifs from contemporary digital artists and cinematic renderers, depicting monoliths in surreal, cyber-fantasy landscapes.

Enjoying this narrative, I’ve named each piece after one of Saturn’s moons where the sculptures could have been found, as if they were relics from a long-gone civilization scattered across these different places to increase chances of survival, the only remnants of their world.

The mediums of neon and stone carry and communicate this ethereal epilogue as they are not commonly found together terrestrially. The glow from the noble gas illuminates the minerality within the stones, as swirls of interstellar matter.

There is a significant contrast in working with the two materials; The glasswork is fast-paced, with one chance to make each bend, while the stone carving is much slower. Yet both require incredible precision to maintain the tight tolerances where the two meet and both have little to no recourse should the materials crack or break. Navigating the fragility of both the stone and the glass and surviving the failures of breakage has been a large part of the mental journey.

I am excited to continue pushing what is understood as possible with neon, as well as inverting the perception of stonework from a classical material to an incredibly modern one from a far-off future world.