My artwork tends to use whatever is at hand—paper bags, plastic to-go boxes, old slippers, boxes, things that hold but are not kept. Out of these I build sculptures and installations. I also make drawings. Sometimes I put objects in the world to see how they survive.

I get lost in the layers of my home of Hawai‘i, of neighborhoods, of local subcultures and the consumer truth of tourism. My work can be playful and unsure.

The things I make help me see the lines between surface and substance, presumption and permission, adaptation and absurdity. I think about those lines all the time, culturally, economically, in the land and ocean, too.

Guilt is a big part of my art. Many people who live in Hawai‘i know the weight and cost of it. A place you love can swallow you whole.

I’m influenced by Arte Povera, a movement that made something out of nothing, and Tropicália, full of celebration, contradiction, and irony in its allegories of Brazil. Andy Warhol’s shadow is in my work, too, with his way of turning the everyday into something sharp and strange.