Artist Statement
“The thing you need is often nearby.” James Joyce
Confabulations
My wall-mounted sculpture-collages are fabulated stories, interrelated through arrangements of materials found on the streets or rediscovered among my studio detritus. I take satisfaction in redeeming objects that have been abandoned, discarded and even run over by giving them new life in what I think of as a visual poem.
I challenge myself to unify disparate elements and materials that at first, and perhaps even second, sight seem to defy aesthetic unity. Although the finished pieces express an unexpected elegance (unexpected in light of the materials’ often wildly diverse origins), I tend to leave some subtle roughness around the edges as well, the physical evidence of my process—Making, Un-Making and Re-Making—which sometimes takes place over a year or more.
I admire and am influenced by non-objective artists like Kazimir Malevich and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and, most significantly, by the box constructions of Joseph Cornell. The frames I use—usually of birch wood—enclose a three-dimensional space, into which I invite the viewer to engage with the elemental relationships, the play of light and shadows, and to be stimulated by new visual expressions of improbable, sly connections.