STATEMENT OF WORK

My figurative sculptures inquire into the human condition. Breton wrote in 1930 "that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. ..." The surrealists searched to find and fix this point. My experience of this contradictory level in the human mind is the mythic, a type of consciousness where divergent potentials of the human can be encompassed within a single image or figure. An ancient example is the figure of Janus, a god who faces opposite directions yet is a single being, both life-giving and death-dealing. I utilize this theme to give unreason, the irrational, even the bestial its due, not as approval but to acknowledge its part in the forces that bring culture into existence and sustain it. It establishes a practical relationship to the catastrophic violence of our times, for the enemy is always part of ourselves.

Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut for his inspiration in art unscathed by artistic culture such as that of the common man, the insane, and children. My inspiration is similar but has more to do with the vernacular language of folk art and the aesthetic intensity and emotional directness of some pre-modern art such as medieval stone carving and some tribal African sculpture.

Modernist sculpture became homeless, but one advantage is the possibility of incorporating spontaneity into its process. Since it isn't commissioned for a particular site and purpose, it can focus on other meanings, new materials, and methods of construction. I improvise life-sized human figures from common materials by assemblage. Its outsider vocabulary enlists bitumen, chalk, ash and dirt, teeth, and hemp as well as paper, bamboo, and plaster.