Monday, July 26, 2010

sculpture

The writing below will be published in a catalog on my sculpture. I wrote it and I hope it is coherent .


My work is in one way presenting you with it's touch or more accurately the way it touches.
The way it contacts the ground that you're standing on,or the way it hangs from a ceiling right above you,the way each part of it touches another part as you look-climb your way through,contacting,connecting and the way one part will lean in close to another and how that other part responds. A sympathetic leaning in by a viewer to the sculpture leaning out,the idea the relationships,they end up being with you and that is being with something in a way I like and understand. Our bodies contain these same material elements too; it's no wonder we can understand a language that has no words.

This isn't an action adventure story I'm telling it's more like a Japanese short story or a really good poem found unexpectedly in Sports Illustrated. The subject of these sculptures more often plays a supportive role to the way it is performing. The sculpture ought not to surprise anyone who values their perception of emotional intelligence as a rewarding experience in and of it self and especially when it becomes intrinsic to an object.

Consciously bending steel with my hands bit by bit is equivalent to saying something slowly and carefully to a loved one. It's what, it's how, it's when, for how long and the nature of the force applied. There all united into one motion that stays where I left it. The steel is a supportive component and expression for another material; white quartz. This is a material that presents itself with minor intervention on my part.

Silica dioxide, better known as white quartz, is a very bright, expressive and useful material. It has just the right molecular density, color, sizes, variety and availability to satisfy me. Quartz has offered me so much and why shouldn't it since we live on a planet consisting of so much of it. We actually walk the ground it's strewn with; and 60% of the earths crust is quartz. I've been picking up quartz stones since I can remember and am thrilled to find something so common and at the same time so valuable. That's a metaphor I revel in.

The malleable steel will support a gesture that quartz then congratulates by simply being what it is. This back and forth combination is my own applied language. For many of us conscience and justification operate inside the same chamber of our body. They're different but equally powerful monitors of our body. When I think of conscience ,I think quartz. It helps me decide what and what not to make and present. You'll recognize my work more by it's gestures than the changing subjects that support them.