5/11/2005

Sense experience and form are very important aspects of my work.  While I usually begin with an idea or metaphor that relates to some part of my experience, my process is to vitalize an idea by reaching for concrete expressions of it which I can then organize into an expressive whole.  What I find most satisfying (and stressful) is to arrive at a new gestalt from within a great complexity.

The motive that led to my current drawings and paintings was a desire to create a kind of tapestry of human interconnections.  Rather than illustrate, I play with the transition between representation and non-representation. I begin with direct, minute, and fragmentary observations of the figure, recording in line whatever I find moving.   I purposely subvert symbolic recognition but seek to retain the tactile and the emotive.  When I arrange a collection of such fragments across a page, or a canvas, I look for ways to build them into an ordered composition.  As a method, it's an improvisational way of staying rooted on the ground while looking at the stars.

For sculpture, assemblage is my method of choice.  I play the symbolic potential of everyday objects (I like to use what is at hand) against the concrete qualities of materials they are made of.  I follow the thread of an idea wherever it takes me.  To work in this manner is like finding my way through the woods.  At some point I come to a clearing, and it all makes sense.  I have combined light bulbs, granite slabs, walnuts, hay, steel, and recorded sound in a single work.  I think of sculpture as object poetry.