I am a sculptor, primarily working in clay relief, modeling and carving malleable, plastic earthen material. For the past thirty years I’ve been kiln-firing terra cotta (red) and earthenware (white) low fire clays. I also make molds, casts and direct sculpture in paper, wax and plaster. 

My work often revolves around structures experienced in space, tableaux and proscenium stages in bas and high relief, and in the round. I use perspective to draw movement through narrative, abstract and representational dimensions. I want a frontal sculpture to be seen from multiple points of view, focus and proximity sensors. 

My subjects are drawn from observation, myth, memory, imagination, and transcribed reference. 

My most recent sculpture is a multi-figure deep relief, part of a series exploring various depths of sculptural wall relief, low to high. 

The challenge of this current piece has been to work over a long period of time with soft smooth clay, making it self-supporting, hollow, and without armature, while limiting myself by an economy of material, compelling a melding of form and structure. I’ve let the clay be made and unmade, fall apart and be rebuilt over and over, challenging what is familiar to me, what I’ve known or thought I knew for years. Not constraining the material by a support system, neither organic nor external, has helped me find my way around the material afresh, to learn how wet clay stands against gravity, compression and decay. Easy to do when working quickly but a challenge to sustain over time. I’ve been intrigued by making a nearly-round object that is also frontal, attempting to adhere to an implied grid and the illusional perspective of a two-dimensional reference. 

My work on this piece has provided the strong central focus I’ve needed to recover from a traumatic and unwelcome move, during the worst, early part of the pandemic in 2020, from a capacious, expansive 21-year exurban studio and living arrangement to a much smaller, compressing and simplifying semi-urban place.

I take photos every day of the sculptures as I work on them. When they’re done, I put them together in sequence as a slideshow.