I make sculpture for the fun and flow. I make up stories about people, places and things. A memory, perception or dream might be the source that I act out with objects, using emotion and a story to project or discover, creating a place that exists outside of time for me. Things I’ve made become old friends with history and shared experiences.
I’ve been making things for as long as I can remember. I started out with snow and mud, then cardboard, tape, glue, scissors, string, paper, plastic. School days of clay and on my own, wax, rubber and plaster.
Later I pursued a classically academic art education including anatomy, fine art drawing, casting, mold and model-making. I found bas-relief to be an oblique way through my academic grid. It provides a basic physical structure to explore form and story without being dependent on an a priori armature.
My subjects are the figure in isolation or relation and the experience of defined place. I use light, perspective and shape. Sometimes I explore space using an immersive perspective of multiple vanishing points. I also create figures that tell or discover stories, both within a framework or situation and as free-standing subjects.
Most recently I’ve been revisiting my earliest love, clay figure modeling, as a child might do without armature or model. It’s a simple challenge and fundamental. I’m learning about the effects of gravity on compression and expansion of structure and material, how form maintains, balances and expresses itself.
I’m also concerned with levels of proximity – how detail is revealed as we get closer to an object, similar to the way polygons become more complex as, in the language of virtual reality, the point of view approaches an object. Detail is subordinate yet essential to the whole.
Modeling, carving or constructing, I also play with light/shadow, surface/structure and fluidity/solidity.