When I began this series, From the Ground Up, I think

I was exorcizing my own demons about the claustrophobia

of interior spaces. I find my inner peace when I step outside

and ground my anxieties in nature. I wanted to document

those closed spaces and material junk making my own (and

many others’) interior spaces grow ever smaller, causing the

feeling of imprisonment in the architectural structures of our

society.  

 

Most of my own (or other individuals’) items seem to find their

way to the floor eventually, so when I got down on the floor to

photograph my own “anxieties”, I discovered there’s an entire

world and viewpoint down there that only babies and pets (non-

verbal communicators) explore on a regular basis. Since we, as a

society, don’t spend much time exploring our own interiors from

that perspective, I wanted to exploit the details I unearthed below

our feet. Those subsequent discoveries brought to light the very

essence of finding and recovering what is lost. How many times,

when one finally does get down on the floor, are we able to find

that piece of jewelry that fell from our grasp, that missing card

from a vintage deck that slipped out when we weren’t looking,

or even the dirt and destruction we have left behind without

knowing it?  

 

When I started crawling around not just my own interiors, but

my friends’ and family’s, and also more public domains in

workshops, offices, and bathrooms, I realized how futile it is

that we put so much energy, money, and supplies into building

these structures to make them look as appealing as possible so

they have monetary value. Eventually, we wear down and even

destroy these shelters with our own human condition. I began

to think about the Buddhist concept of impermanence, and how

we strive so hard, as a society and as a race, to try and make

things permanent. This striving is a rather unsuccessful and vain

endeavor in the end, causing more physical waste than emotional

comfort.  

 

My conclusion in all of this led back to my original intention of

exorcizing my own demons. When the floors became so appealing

as a visual representation of much that we ignore on both a

physical and emotional level, I thought, what would happen if

floors were no longer a part of our architecture? We would return

to the structural ideas of primitives or cultures inherent to the

natural world, making shelter that interacted with the native

environment and our exterior world, rather than the opposite

practice of man versus nature. Staying grounded in our social

concepts would perhaps become easier, without the distraction

of trying to conquer impermanence, and glorifying our human

condition with impractical edifices and materiality. My objective is

to document that impracticality and materiality (and invade

personal and societal privacy through voyeurism) that has

caused both the physical clutter and emotional distress of our

present living conditions.