I find sources of inspiration in nature. When I see the sedge grass in the Margaret Brent parking lot waving in the wind with its mass of stalks moving together, and the purple seed heads are blurring together to make a purple haze I think how I can capture that feeling of what I am seeing, not what I am seeing.
North of campus, out in the St. Mary’s River there’s a sandbar that’s sometimes covered by the tide. That’s been an interesting place for me. That layer of water makes a fuzzy glassy lens over the sandbar, like looking through an old green bottle.  Sometimes the wind makes waves that change the sandbar into a comb like structure, the peaks and valleys of water will show some yellow sand underneath for a second as the waves roll in to shore. I’m trying to search out that feeling of power you can see in the moving water.
Just across the Mattapany Road from our SMP studios is a bamboo grove. The mass of bamboo will bend and twist in the wind. The taller bamboos will twist separately on top of the green bending mass below them. The vertical stalks will bend and twist into a lattice work pattern that will change with each gust of wind. I’m searching out this force that can make these patterns and the feeling you get when the wind hits you.

I’m not trying to capture a realist picture, the actual object that is familiar and tangible. I want to picture the force underneath that makes the object move, bend, twist, fly, or sail. For me abstraction is the way to express this invisible force. I want to capture movement through gesture and arrangement. My work is about power of moving liquids, fluid power of wind and water. Imagine a bird using the air currents, a fish moving through the water, water flowing over a waterfall being channeled and wearing away at underlying rock, stem and branches bending with the wind, and pictures of wind tunnel experiments.
The first semester of SMP I concentrated in combining some earlier ceramic work and my new interest of printmaking. I’d never done extensive printmaking until I came to St. Mary’s. Printing offers a degree of instant result that contributes to my process of making art. I can change a color or reprint another layer quickly. Once you take the paper out of the press or lift the stencil, there’s your print.  My earlier ceramics did influence my printmaking, but I did not find the finished combination successful. I started to think about what projects I had done earlier that I was satisfied with, projects that were complete and represented what I wanted to capture, and what was the feeling I was trying to capture.

Thinking back to a sculpture class at St. Mary’s I remembered two projects that I did that involved showing the force of the wind and water on the St. Mary’s River. The first project was a set of three unfired clay obelisks that I put on the beach, like a castle, at the high tide line. I photographed the effects of the tide had on them. After a high tide there was a green coating on the gray surface. It didn’t take long for algae to start to make a home. On one obelisk a single small hole had been bored in. I never saw what made it but in 24 hours something had made a home inside the obelisk. In the following days the clay obelisk crumbled away and dissolved like a kid’s sandcastle at the end of a day at the beach.  In a project to show the direction and power of the tidal flow I made three plastic fins that would each rotate on a steel pole hammered into the riverbed. Getting out ten feet or so into the river, over some razor-sharp oysters and seeing 2 snakes swim by to the shore, I hammered the fins in place. The fins stayed up for a few days but the force from the tides moving in and out tore them apart.