STATEMENT OF WORK

I have been a practicing visual artist for sixty years. Now an eighty-one year old, the fruition of my lifelong focus on the human subject unfolds. Primarily I work in sculpture, sourcing inner life, global events, and world art history, using the forms of mask, animal totem, and European figure and portrait head, set in the context of our particular historic conditions and place.

In the last twenty years of sculpture making, its language has accessed styrofoam packing materials as well as paper laminates, a material which I invented with layered newspaper and rice paste, malleable like clay yet permitting hollow forms. I also formulated a finishing plaster to brush onto the paper which forms a shell. These found and invented materials are complemented by cardboard, Hydrocal plaster, bamboo, cloth, and paint with the result of a handmade object in human-body scale.

The process of my art is improvisation, a form of experience where time can return to its organic flow, with its variable qualities, in distinction to mechanical and intellectualized time channeled by clocks, ideas, programs, and schedules. In this way the process of improvisation is a political as well as aesthetic stance, cooperating with its object world instead of seeking to control and dominate it. My art seeks to integrate its formal practices into the life and events of this time.