Context
This time we are living in is an endgame: our actions nearly reduced to rearranging the deck chairs on the metaphorical Titanic. We live now in the wake of a Cartesian Paradigm - a divisive model in which we champion the mechanistic and material over the ecological and ephemeral. Species annihilation, toxification of the planet's resources, and the concentration of wealth and power are some of the outcomes. The loss of stillness, imagination, critical thinking, and sensuality are collateral damage. We continue to behave in our destructive ways in spite of the facts.
Art can be a transformer: it can bypass rational, linear processes; it can stir the heart. Art can be the matter of the unconscious and therefore work as dreams do - a vision interrupting the quotidian, even the narcosis. My current work looks inward towards intrapersonal transformation as the source of outward social change. Yet, making art now is an act of faith. At the interface of sensual reality and the dream world, I work against the rising flood waters of our disembodied digital age.
Work
The sculptures are koans: hybrid, paradoxical forms that invite an opening in consciousness. The imagery is archetypal, like that of dreams: part familiar and part strange. Both koan and dream require contemplation and a turning inward for understanding.
I draw what I do not know - what I cannot yet see. I work on the image with the paper on the floor and the wall using my forearm, palm, and fingers as tools - as extensions of core. Drawing frees me from the constraints of gravity, mass, and the rigors of construction. It is a dance, rendering still form to movement.
Materials and Process
The materials I use are both substance and symbol yet all are ordinary. Many are gathered from the land I live on. The love that I have of these materials - their sources as well as the processes associated with transforming them - is about polishing the beauty of the mundane and the manifestation of change.
I have worked as a gardener for as long as I have as a sculptor. The rhythm of my studio work is influenced by the seasons and weather. The land gives me a model of creation, destruction, and fallowness - an enduring trinity, a paradox that sustains me. It is a sanctuary that I carefully tend. Art and Earth define us as human beings; the rupture of connection with either renders us senseless and therefore only brutal.
