About

I work in wood and mixed media from my studio in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. In general, my work looks at the ways rational ideas and irrational ideas come together to shape the world we live in. Sometimes that means following a pattern and trusting a process, without knowing what will result. Other times it means establishing rules and playing within those rules to find out what’s possible. Craft traditions and expectations around them provide undertones of meaning. Rules are sometimes broken, and expectations are sometimes violated.

Right now I have three active bodies of work: the Long Shadow Series, the panel paintings, and the narrative sculptures. In the Long Shadow Series, I make a regular repeating pattern in wood and colored epoxy resin. Then I carve compound curves on it. These curves stretch and distort the pattern like a shadow in the afternoon sun. The form I carve comes from my gut, a kind of collaboration with the rational geometry of the distorting pattern. It’s mathematics by intuition. Colors shift and opacity varies as I go, never entirely certain where any of the moving parts will settle. The not knowing is part of the fun, like firing ceramics.

The panel paintings are a street fair of influences, skills, ideas, and crafts. They all begin with plywood panels. I drill and carve into them, sew through them, add to the surfaces, and more. While they are surfaces, they’re also structures to build on. They are objects more than images. They are a space for play. Craft traditions mix and mingle: woodworking, string art, decoupage, assemblage, and the kind of painting one might do on the gas tank of a motorcycle. They all bring connotations and baggage. As the crafts rub together, they create friction and a different energy. I’m much more interested in this energy than masterful craft.

The narrative sculptures are my oldest body of work. They address 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 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 like old-fashioned legends. These allegories rarely make a whole lot of rational sense, but then neither does anything else.