I am from Houston. I went to school in Seattle, then New Orleans for a semester, lived in Baltimore and then I finished school at Rhodes, in Tennessee. I’ve been in New York five years now. The first year was really tough. I was a barista and I worked for a few artists and a gallery. That’s how I got my art experience. Then I started working for the Neon Shop, I have been there for four years now.

Yeah, I like moving a lot, adapting to new places.

I had no experience! I learned everything I know about it from my job and I took a geology course at Rhodes my last semester. We were studying pore samples. That is where the cylindrical forms in my work come from. I tried making my own pore samples. You drill into the ground and pull out a long cylinder of the earth, which can be several hundred feet long. Then you study the different layers that show the history of the earth and how things were made.

Well, the course was a requirement but I like that the rocks tell time and history and they hold a lot in them visually. That has stuck with me. Rocks themselves are keepsakes because they are marking time and they are also very beautiful. I mostly work with geodes, the more three-dimensional ones and the thin slices which are dyed. I like the way how they are made, and the fact that you have to crack them, and how the outside is raw and the insides are beautiful and crystal.

I think so. I am more interested in the geology of rocks rather than its spirituality, but I know that always comes across because of the associations. I do not mind it, because I feel like making them can sometimes be a spiritual process – it’s very meditative, and I am very focused and deliberate the entire time.

I handpick everything. I am very deliberate in choosing the stones that are very symmetrical or come in certain shapes. They come as you see them, then I glue them making sure they are symmetrical and I sink them into the concrete. The neon works take a bit more planning.

I just gather a bunch of materials, a bunch of rocks and Plexiglas and I sit with them. The neon ones are a bit more planned, more technical. All of the concrete moulds are hollow. I build a rectangle out of wood, I mark where the neon will go, place the dowels, build an outer mould and then I pour in the concrete.

For me they are markers of time. But in my mind they could be life-size landscapes where you could walk around the surface. I think a lot about what the landscapes and the night sky look like on other planets, or how the setting sun would look from Jupiter or Mars. Some of them have a ring of sand around – that could be cosmic dust. It’s a threefold: it’s coming from a landscape, it’s coming from itself, but it is also coming from geology, time and momentum of time which encapsulates a feeling or a moment.

I like things to be balanced. That’s the fun of using natural materials, they will never be perfectly symmetrical, so I have to work around it. In my mind, I want them to be perfectly symmetrical, which I can do in a drawing after. In real life they might be a little off. But it is really satisfying to make the drawing afterwards, to make them complete.

I feel like my new work came out of my old one very easily. I was making these USB crystals, which are similar forms to my new work, and I was also doing these spiritual objects, still geometric and colourful. Then in my first studio in New York I started working with Plexiglas, geodes and concrete. Once I started working at the Neon Shop I added the neon, which is what I am now primarily working with. The new work is a little more abstract, not a landscape but rather an object from those landscapes. They are very surreal.

Yeah, totally. I am a total Star Wars fan!

I really like Keith Sonnier. He made neon work in the 60’s, no text pieces, but all imagery and lines. Greg Bogin, Eva Hess, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd… that cannon of Minimal and Earth artists. There is a certain meditative and beautiful simplicity in their works. I see works that are busy and I think it is harder to make works that are minimal and quiet. The world is so busy that making very specific and intentional work is a good balance.

Mostly techno and 90’s pop. It’s like listening to candy.