Much of my work is inspired by sailor’s art of scrimshaw and the soldier’s craft of trench art. My “Dead Laptop Series” is also inspired formally by the embroidered samplers of early American schoolgirls that often included alphabets, nature motifs, and moral verse intended to instill virtuous behavior.

As a mid-wife to our on-line experiences, the modern, aesthetically “neutral” exterior of the Apple iBook belies our messy, Byzantine entanglements in cyber-space. The on-line experience creates a virtual community while simultaneously alienating us physically from each other. In this atmosphere of alienation, individual and comprehensive understanding struggles against the atomized dispersal of superficial distraction. With this body of work, I explore this crisis in orientation.

By elaborately engraving these “dead” laptops, I counter the effaced legacy of their former syndetic life and leverage them to examine a broad range of contemporary issues.