Artist Statement
I am concerned with how life relates to the built
environment. The fluid, conscious, idiosyncratic, organic world
co-exists and interacts with the more inflexible, systematic, organized
structures of machines, cities and infrastructure. We have created
the built environment that now envelopes us, shapes us as we shape
it, interacts with us and affects us as much as we it.
Emotion butts up against hard-edged structure, evolving forms of life
against unchanging engineered structures and processes,
idiosyncratic against rule-based-ness, dual aspects competing and
cooperating, influencing each other in an endless process of building
and rebuilding, evolving and developing.
I like to work in steel because it is the quintessential material of the
engineered built environment but also the most malleable and
forgiving of materials. When heated steel melts and flows and takes
on almost infinite shapes, textures and surfaces. If heat is a symbol
for emotion and the force of life, it transforms the hard reality of cold
steel and all that symbolizes. Man shapes and alters and is shaped
and altered by the structures of steel he has invented and built. And
all growing things interact with and affect those structures.
In the Totem series, the architectural cityscape enfolds human
culture and its icons. Our totems reflect our cities as ancient totems
reflected forests and wildlife, the symbolic languages of our lives.
