About

My practice right now is bouncing through the space between three bodies of work: the narrative sculptures (which have been the backbone of my artistic identity for many years), the Long Shadow Series, and the Open Book Series. The first addresses the quiet, personal struggles many of us deal with every day, through a poetic and compact visual language centered on form, material, and scale shift. Most works use the fundamental structure of narratives, setting up a conflict in the simplest way: There’s a setting, an object, and a hero (who is sometimes present in their story, and sometimes not).

As in life, my heroes are ordinary characters in extraordinary situations. Many of them are explorers or adventurers, like you and me, out in the world trying to achieve goals or rewards without clear rules and directions. They bravely face isolation, defeat, adversity, and success. Most have a sincere optimism that comes from fairy tales, magic realism, and old-fashioned legends. These allegories rarely make a whole lot of rational sense, but then neither does anything else.

In the Long Shadow Series, I begin by forming a pattern. Then I fill it with epoxy, mount it on a lathe, and carve compound curves on it. These curves perform the magic trick of stretching and distorting the pattern like a shadow in the afternoon sun. I can’t really quite predict the shapes that will come out of the process, and I love the surprises. I accept and lean into some of them as I’m carving (turning), and others I reject by carving them away. The carving feels like a kind of collaboration with something I don’t understand, even though it came from me.

The Open Book Series creates form from patterns, volume from lines, with nods to Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo. I’ve limited the possibilities by always including a folded circle. From there, some are open and giving. Some are limp. Some are botanical and growing. The balance between the rational and the intuitive is what compels me most here.