In face of  the incursion of technology into the modern world I find myself distressed by an emotional incoherence.  As a result of our growing dependence on technology, I believe humans are losing their innate ability to feel, much less process emotion. I make art with the desire to mollify the disarray I see within myself as a result  of technology. My creative practice takes the form of personal, even private, exploration  that allows me to unravel and meditate on the nuances of my own emotion. This “meditation” is made possible through a model of art making that holds a close alliance to the idea of self generated symbolism (aka “private symbol” as termed by ethnologist Raymond Firth).  In his 1973 book Symbols: Public and Private Firth writes: 

“There is a broad psychological domain in which the study is made not exclusively but basically of symbolic forms presented by individuals, often not shared with other people, and corresponding essentially to personal interests, claims and stresses. The symbol of dream, hallucination, prophetic revelation or drug induced experiences belongs to this domain; and so does much of the initial creativity of poetry and the visual arts. A great deal of this personal symbolism is private in the sense that it is intended to be, or construed to be exclusive to the individual concerned, offering his own particular solution to his problem of adaptation to some aspects of the immediate environment or to his conception of the world.” (p. 207) 

Firth outlines private symbols concerned with an individual's own vantage point, generated in response to personal experience and commonly not disclosed to other people. I have found that the process of creating personal symbols aids the metabolization of emotion. Tying the nuanced, elusive entity of human emotion to concrete and visual mediums, letting it be represented, enables this otherwise ephemeral experience to be engaged, organised (and if need be expelled) through the process of art making. The action of bestowing personal belief into visual and concrete mediums - the act of creating my own symbols - aids in unearthing and making sense of my own emotional dialog. 

The foundation of my creative practice is based in digital illustration. My drawings not only conceive personal symbolic forms but serve as a direct gateway to interrogate the digital. Consequently my digital illustration dictates the visual fabric of my work and is the platform I use to speculate on my relationship to technology. By transferring symbols that were initially created in digital illustrations into traditional hands-on practices such as painting, welding, sculpting, and casting, the influence of the digital medium on my emotional well-being becomes evident. In this way I enact a transference that shifts  digital content off of the screen and into various (usually physical) forms.  For instance, I might draw my symbol of an orange bird and subsequently create the same symbol out of clay. This process utilizes my private symbols as a vehicle to transfer emotion out of the digital realm. I believe that reinterpreting digital content in this way serves as a fertile ground for comprehending how I personally navigate emotions when faced with technology. Although the content I am engaging with (private symbols) is construed to be non-public, I contend that the transformation of this material from the digital realm into alternative forms contributes to a broader conversation about how humanity is assimilating technology as a whole.