Current
Lately, my sculptures have been romancing absurdity. The forms suggest the animation of figuration, but omit a sum of recognizable parts. A gesture remains, and color-saturated abstraction occupies the rest.
Having so much fun is hard work. Sculptures are improvisational as they are made, but they may require months of work before they are resolved. Alert play is part of my process as I pour, brush and drip the material before it hardens to a candy colored shell. Listening comes next, as the works complain that this color is ridiculous and this texture must be sanded away, and please hack off this protrusion. I work to mollify their discontent.
I wait for the moment when something snaps into place and tells me the sculpture is complete. The issue of balance, as both a metaphor and literal component, plays a critical role, as parts teeter on (seemingly) precarious supports. This restraint — the act of holding things in place against all odds, speaks to a larger human tension — our daily delicate balance between stability and emotional tumult. Equally important is a sense of exuberant whimsy, one that is both preposterous and ridiculous, while seeking a nonsensical sublime.
Prints
My most recent series of portrait prints originated as steel-cut engravings from the Victorian era. The original prints were highly stylized with prescribed textures of dots, dashes, and cross-hatching to render the picture with striking realism. In my hands, they are enlarged, cropped and made more dramatic. Contemplating these elaborately wrought images compelled me to deeply consider both the printmaker and subject, once so current and timely, now passed into obscurity. My meditations on these objects is physically evidenced through the complex patterns of holes I remove from the surface, as I consider both history’s imperfect rendering of the past and its willfulness to recede, while appreciating the irony that as I renew a dialogue with these antiquated images, time is working to erase me, too.
2008-2018
As a child, I often fantasized about nature, and my determination of it – at least in my mind – fulfilled a sense of control that I lacked in life. As an adult, I find myself returning to these concerns and using them as the subject of my artwork, while considering their larger symbolic relevance, both personally and societally. Here, history preoccupies me in small and grand terms. My interest in time has been a consistent subtext of the natural forms I select – the formation of rocks and minerals, coral reefs, the rings of trees — all mark time.
For a number of years, I have worked almost exclusively with brightly colored resin, in bodies of work that can be categorized as plant, sea, and rock forms. Flowers interest me because of their transient nature, their association with memorials, and their potential as vehicles for riotous color, as I assemble them into wall installations composed of hundreds of pieces. Tree forms manifest as logs, cross sections or sticks. When a massive backyard tree was cut down at my childhood home, I became intrigued by the trunk, and the wavering network of rings that recorded the rainfall and hardships of every year. I realized this tree also told my simultaneous story, and with its demise, I had lost a witness. Sculptures of grasses act as stand-ins for human longing. Coral forms draw upon themes of continuance, as they refer to reefs that are thousands of years old. Finally, freestanding sculptures inspired by rock structures are created with multiple parts of cast, assembled and carved resin. My goal is for them is to seem preposterous and wondrous, to underscore that nothing is more perplexing, complex, and extraordinary than nature.
