Artist's Statement
I do direct carving in stone
and make bronzes, often using the stone as part of the process. My sculpture
is usually based on the human form, primarily the female nude. I often
carve torsos or fragments of the body, believing that the part can be as
expressive as the whole. The sculptures are in a sense totem objects that
celebrate our ordinary every day life. Their function, as in prehistoric
or primitive sculpture, is to reveal and revere -- to make magic. We can
see in nature an organic energy and essential beauty, a power that has the
force of a religious experience: an illumination, an intuitive flash wherein
we glimpse our original nature. In my sculpture, through reduction and simplicity
of form, balance and tension, and interaction with the material, I seek this
revelation.
To name it always falls short. One must use contradiction
and paradox, freely choosing elements from the rational and the intuitive,
classical and romantic, abstract and figurative, beginning each time with
the unknown.
My sculpture is my response to nature and art. There
is a long struggle to develop the skill and vision that allows the freedom
for a spontaneous response. It is based on intimate experience with the sensual,
tactile images of life, but not solely dependent on the visible. Working
through the known to the unknown, I use the human form, and sometimes animals,
to penetrate the mystery and express spirit.
What interests me most is the timeless element in
the art of all periods and places My sculpture has always been a composite
and synthesis of elements drawn from nature and the history of art. With
sandstone in particular (perhaps affected by their rude nature), I seem
to move backward through time from classical to archaic to prehistoric--
to the unknown form in the formless. Through more and more reduction, down
to elemental forces of rock and earth, I seek a unity that expresses something
more than the visible.
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