Statement
My imagery stems from experiences gained growing up and working on a grain farm and constructing houses from foundation to finish cabinetry. Each of these activities offered fresh ‘seasonal’ opportunities and explorations into process and intent much the same way I approach images as activity today. They both taught me the importance of work, craftsmanship, play and planning, a love of form building, patience and labor, as well as introducing a great deal of curiosity for a vast variety of materials and methods of assembly (as well as destruction). It was during these years that I often found my visual interest being directed to the discarded or in-progress items. Debris fields became visually more engaging and held my interest more than the final structure. Pride was fleeting but the images enduring. Within agriculture, the marks in the soil from tilling, the ritual of tedious hoeing, and half buried corn stalks in winter snow were visual magic and as a record of intense engagement. The product itself hardly mattered.
Each set of the visual works on this website describes a searching, assembling forms, and then finding ways to disassemble or question the parts and rebuild. This process of building, destroying and rebuilding I find to be a natural cycle in both everyday life and spirituality. A reverence, along with irreverence for image making: care and disregard are both deemed necessary and both are promoted.
Since 2024 the work concentrates more on drawing. Materials have been limited to Dura-Lar Matte archival polyester film, pencil, Higgins Ink and Flashe vinyl paint. The semi-transparent film allows for overlay similar to a printed image derived from multiple matrices. Source material for imagery is primarily from sketchbooks and everyday encounters resulting in a wide variety of seemingly unrelated solo and mini-series endeavours. The activity is in anticipation of finding my way through these new layered debris fields while taking the opportunity to question what is of value.