Artist Statement

“The Things that Shake Loose…”


Things that shake loose are often pieces of material culture that separate themselves from a larger context and settle within the mundane corners of transient paths. Because I am myself a transient and contingent human being, I find myself searching in those mundane corners for the sediment of material culture. It is here that I find my raw source material and motivation as a sculptor. As I transfer those things that shake loose from one mundane corner of the world to my own space I develop an interior dialogue with those things, rather like an archaeologist trying to reconstruct the identity of a particular culture through collected and discarded materials. My dialogue with the collected materials involves an in-depth physical and emotional investigation of the limits and impactfulness inherent within each object, and the possible relationships between that object and other objects or physical elements. I then test my findings against other notions or narratives that attempt to explore illuminating codes of the nexus, genesis, or revelation implicit in those materials that I have collected as a peripatetic traveler.

As a sculptor I am constantly testing the concepts of joinery and craftsmanship in relation to my source material. Through an investigations of that material I hope to come to a fuller understanding of each piece I collect. Such an understanding can present itself seamlessly or, at times, crudely, depending upon the limitations contained in the materials themselves. The connections I discover and represent in my work intend to express a fuller statement of the properties and possibilities or objects within a new contextual framework. Upon completion, my work suggests new identities, new ways of seeing, which not only echo the illuminating code of the past through the material but, discovers a new energy--ranging from the spiritual and sacred, to interactive process and playfulness, which in the end may be the same thing.