Statement
My process stems from experiences gained working on a grain farm and constructing houses. 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, as well as introducing a great deal of curiosity for a vast variety of materials and processes. It was during these years that I often found my visual interest being directed to the discarded or in-progress states of the farm or construction site. A pile of lumber, cement forms, and torn tar paper were often visually more engaging and more challenging than the final set structure. Marks in the soil from tilling, the ritual of tedious hoeing, and half buried corn stalks in winter snow were as magical as the crop itself.
Each set of the visual works 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 has taken an intentional curve and deals more with the media of drawing and pigment. 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. Chance relationships are encouraged as well as venues of alternate pictorial exploration. The activity and resulting imagery is related more to finding than to making.