I
really do get confused at times. When I meditate, I sense deep tones or
chords that underlie my everyday thought processes. The confusion arises
when I try to articulate these deep impulses with everyday language, what
comes out is a garbled echo of the clarity I feel inside. I understand these
feeling/tones are more than just my personal psychological structure,
although they are a considerable part of it, they are also the pre-verbal
chords of the world I experience that resonate within me and provide the
underpinnings of not only my consciousness but the consciousness of the
social order we all live within. As a sculptor, I find the clearest
communication to be through the direct manipulation of materials.
In my
sculpture “Anima” (2008, 8’x8’x6’), threads of unwoven rope coalesce on the
floor into a tightly compressed three-dimensional grid that ‘breathes’
upward as it expands and connects into second larger overarching grid; a
thick wiry black steel grid that ‘hunches’ the expanding breath back into
itself. The feeling/tone expressed is both the expanding breath and the
containment/hunch of the protective shell: Soft expansion – hard
containment.
My
Goal as a sculptor is to get as close as possible to these ephemeral
pre-verbal sensations. I gauge success by the degree of presence the
sculpture has on me. In my sculpture “Thorn Fragment” (2007, 92"x85"x61")
the imperative was to invoke ‘barrier/protection’ through the creation of
hundreds of large thorns over a hard steel grid structure. To express this
feeling, the thorns had to have a threatening quality to then with a smooth,
hard, dark matte finish. I chose unglazed black cast porcelain as the best
material for this effect. The supporting heavy steel infrastructure had to
have an almost military/fortification quality to it to enhance the
protection quality I was after. A bright blue-silver zinc finish was chosen
to set the dark thorns off. Now I can stand inside this 7’ high, 600 pound
wrap-around structure and feel hundreds of large black thorns emanating from
me. I am the barrier. I am held in place and I am protected.
For my
piece “Torn” (2005, 48”x72”x48”) I imagined an infinite grid field that
coalesced at the intersection points of a proto-house form. Several earlier
sculptures used this house form as a stand-in for myself; a self-portrait
abstraction that best expresses the feeling of existential containment I
feel in an abstract form that can be used sculpturally in many ways. The
intersection points of this piece felt like accretions of irritation: House
of irritations imposed within a serene infinity. To realize this piece I
began to cut hundreds of jagged radial ‘bursts’ out of sheet steel with a
plasma torch. I then folded and welded them to conform to the angular
geometry of the house form. Each “irritation-intersection” was then
suspended from stainless steel cable and hung from the ceiling. The result
is a sculpture that carves the house out of space with minimal material in a
way that evokes a disquieting effect of a crystallizing irritant within the
static geometry of the house form.
As I
continue to create new work, my visual vocabulary is increasing and becoming
more sophisticated, allowing me to get closer to a faithful externalization
of the deep chords that resonate inside me. Making sculpture is the only
path I’ve found that brings clarity to the confusion that tends to cloud my
everyday existence.
