Using my own experience as a guide as well as trial and error, I experiment with bringing people together using props or tools, events or designed spaces. I see if I can intervene in the way we relate or communicate with one another by destroying old patterns to create a moment of social innovation. Much of my work is done collaboratively. This means that while I make things with other people, together we negotiate every step of the process until a final work or concept emerges from between us. I revere the process because it does not allow for singular self- expression. It demands a dedicated self-awareness, respect for my collaborator, and a willingness to change, to give way to a combined potential that is greater than ours as individuals. It initiates a structure that invites the kind of social innovation I value, and it’s fun. My overall focus has evolved out of my personal effort to distinguish what matters in life. I have concluded that at the very least, I know we have choices in how we relate, and these choices always affect ourselves and other people. I am curious about the breadth these affects, and about our capacity for self-intervention. Can objects or places help us access our ability to improvise or change? I use my own phenomenal response to aesthetic and material combinations to create a place or object that is safe and familiar but offers opportunity for risk or creative intervention. Play is a common theme in the objects I make, which are largely intended for adults. Conversation is another theme, for obvious reasons. I suppose my real question is: Can a work of art liberate something from within an individual or between people, something unexpected, something otherwise uncalled upon? I am an idealist—I like to think it can. But answering this question definitively is not as useful as continually striving to ask it. My work gives me the pleasure of doing that.