I have been given the special opportunity to work largely in steel this year. Its permanent quality was the first thing that drew me to this material. As I continued to work with it, I discovered its expressiveness in that I could have a physical gesture or construction in mind, and create it instantly but preserve it indefinitely. Welding became my pencil in space. I could work with it to create sculptures that directly reflected ideas of balance and imbalance, dimensionality and flatness, and relationships in negative space between my sculptures.

My works are linear constructions that mimic specific gestures present in both plant life cycles and physical human actions. In some works, I study what an object looks like when it is succumbing to gravity, unable to break free from its downward pull. In others, I study how these living gestures look when they have the energy to lift out of gravitational pull, still growing upwards as their physical form allows them. I build them to give conviction and breath to material that originally had none. Potential for growth is important to me, as I will only know the end of a work when I see it. While I have some plan of shape and form when I begin, it generally takes on very different compositions by the end. I must bend my will to the hardness and ferocity of the steel I work with. A sort of reciprocity is built between the object and myself, each of us compromising to come to a new conclusion.

I am devoted to process, interaction and dialogue between things. Like my own will, every environment or new construction creates the piece anew. I find that when people view my work in landscape, they associate it with plant life. When they interact with it in a gallery setting, they associate it more with the human form, or themselves. This is not illusion, but rather a necessity to place subject on the form. In reality, these postures or movements are the same in both subjects. These two associations indicate that I am working on creating an inorganic form into one that could come to capture the physicality’s of organic forms. From repetitive study of the landscape and the figure I come to recognize commonalities such as gesture between these living forms that are often strictly contrasted.