Statement
Most of my work is made of wood, formerly trees — living breathing creatures essential to our existence. A tree’s surface is complex, emotionally deep, and not unlike our skin. Growing up in a richly diverse tropical environment filled with a dense variety of life forms, I hungered to merge with nature.
My deep love for this world grew into imagining myself as being seamlessly a part of it. At age 8 years old I knew I wanted to be a sculptor, someone who creates and makes shapes that speak. I was in love with the endless unique forms of life which lived in a strange and beautiful harmony.
I’ve been continuously engaged in developing a body of work in which the individual pieces are treated as new words which over time have grown into sentences, then paragraphs, and now, filling 30-foot-long murals of objects which “read” left to right in black and white and natural wood tones.
Collectively, my families of objects depict the convergence within our minds of the worlds of biological life forms, the mineral world, our intellectual world of abstract concepts and our built and written language – all to satisfy the need to explain and appreciate our existence. It is a lot to ask that objects be capable of explaining the unexplainable. For us, this requires a deep dive into the unconscious to loosely grasp this loose narrative made up of unfamiliar forms. These forms help me understand and express how I see the world and who I am in it. Simply stated a 19th century physicist explained the universe, “Something unknown is trying to do, we don’t know what.” We do get closer to answering the big questions but are still scratching our heads.
So, in the absence of adequate information our imaginations are free to go into overdrive to provide answers. Not a bad thing. Aside from using our early childhood inclination to suspend disbelief, this body of work also relies on our anthropomorphizing of objects, imagining their evolution through “object” procreation and recognizing the intimate relationships with each other no matter how unlikely. (see “The Tick and the Pea.”) We are a species in need of being understood by others and ourselves.
It is my intention that physically sharing space with my work will inspire observers to feel intuitively connected with their own creativity by allowing themselves to dream and imagine as they once did. To fall in love with nature again. My Art is intended to help viewers relive the awe they experienced as children in the perfection of nature and their own inevitable inclusion in the natural world, if we can save it.