The material possibilities of powders of the earth and water: concrete and cement, echo nature’s volatility in my current work, but they do so only in so far as they are the result of an alchemy. I am interested that movement and animation are sustained in the weight, balance and stance of my art.
My current sculptures, entitled Envoy, Extrusion, Extension and conundrums, are cast concrete, encouraging the mold’s imprints and folds or ribs along with tonal fluxuations of the gray material. Cast in disposable plastic and paper packaging containers these pieces, in effect, render the disposable concrete, albeit transformed. They have an environmental and consumerist comment on how the disposable really is not such. Their stack-y building-block presence, their humpty-dumpty putting-things-back-together approach is about a re-building and re-ordering of the act of making. These works are my humorous pun on the formality of sculptural conventions, yet they are serious about ideas of destruction and transformation, totems, pillars, anthropomorphic forms and still lifes.
My current works have an enmeshed relationship to my long-standing interest in myth, archaeology, early cultures and primary structures. My forms negotiate a tension between their own literalness and abstraction, exploring their essential materiality rather than purely abstract. At times, there appear to be recognizable things in the pieces which are then rendered out-of-context or displaced and transformed to go to work in my visual language.
Melding the ruggedness of the earthy, weighty concrete with a sensous fluidity of surface allows me a range of experience. I seek a spiritedness within my forms, a life and rhythm.