STATEMENT OF WORK

My studio is a workroom  where I make sculpture, drawings and installations. I work with wood because its varied manifestations (as found in the forest, the construction industry, simulated or in furniture) are rich with references to nature and culture. The circularity of the life cycle of wood—how it grows, reseeds itself, decomposes, then regenerates—is like the way the Hindu god, Shiva, destroys the world in order to make it again. And like Shiva, I create work by resurrecting discarded pieces of furniture and re-configuring my own scraps.

My work is intuitive and process-based, often about history, material culture, and relationships. The processes I employ include woodcarving and fabrication. I don’t know what I am going to make will look like; that is the work. I know that I can count on my manual skills to build what I invent. One of my studio mottos is, “One thing lets another make sense.” So, I begin— trust how the work unfolds and then make decisions as the work takes form. My most recent tableau works display the cumulative effect of my approach.

The titles of my works are literary, not necessarily descriptive, but informational. I employ the title to communicate some of the things I am thinking about and discovering as I work. For example, the title Blossfeldt-Rietveld / Slosburg-Ackerman. (An illustration. Imminent Collapse and Ascent.) is autobiographical and meant to suggest precariousness with the possibility of a resurrection.

If you visit my studio, you will see a columbarium, of sorts, in the form of boxes stored on shelves. For over thirty years I have saved the sawdust, wood chips and scraps that were left from carving and fabricating my work. These remains, Collected Sawdust, reside in bespoke boxes at one end of my studio as the material catalogue of my own production.