Artist Statement
In my artwork I use ancient, traditional, and invented craft techniques to fashion objects and installations. I work intuitively, and most often I avoid the specific in favor of what I think of as the general or universal.
For me, much of the power of sculpture is bound up in it’s physicality. The materials I use include wood, found objects, reeds, paper mache, wax, seeds, etc. All have inherent beauty and richness of color, texture, and associated references. Some of the processes I engage in are: collecting, sorting, assemblage, woodworking, basket-making, miscellaneous crafts, and, sometimes a bit of mechanical and sound collage assembly.
Although my work springs from a sensual & intuitive response to form & materials, rather than from a conceptual orientation, I do have very particular ideas about meanings encoded in it. For example, the grid & the spiral, basic to basket construction, represent, respectively, a human conception of order, and the life force. This is a combination of ideas that I find essential, and endlessly fascinating. Raw, wild nature (the materials) meets cool mental abstraction (structure & process) and the imposition of human will (the form and function). To me, basket-making embodies a distinct & beautiful human relationship to the natural world, and reflects a globally shared cultural history.
Use of discarded and non-art materials has been a strategy I often return to. In addition to the visual attraction that I feel for these materials, the references inherent in many of them add dimensions of meaning to the ...
