About

Omaha, Nebraska, USA

I build poetic, reductive, and carefully balanced sculptures in wood and other craft media. In general, they look at the ways rational ideas and irrational ideas come together to shape the world we live in. Process is important. Rules are important but sometimes broken, and expectations are sometimes violated. They usually land in the colorful area between object and image. Right now I have three active bodies of work:

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.

The panel paintings are a street fair of influences, skills, ideas, and crafts. They all begin with plywood panels. I drill and carve, sew through them, add to the surfaces, and more. They are a space for serious play. Craft traditions mix and mingle, each bringing connotations and baggage. As the crafts rub together, they create friction and energy. I’m much more interested in this energy than masterful craft. These paintings are sculptures about relationships.

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.