I habitually wonder why. Unsurprisingly, I make art to encourage others to practice asking why, and its close associates, ’what if’, and ‘why not’.  

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I aspire to destabilize habits of perception and belief using art. But why?

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By creating new things, I enjoy the freedom to mess around with what one cannot easily say or do, both the beautiful and the profane, and I invite others to see this. To that end I favor the jester’s craft of wrapping serious things in humorous packages. I experiment with ways of making the familiar strange, and therefore new.

At any given moment, tacit physical and cultural assumptions ground our sense-making routines without being unpacked for investigation. Body sensation, body image, sex, mortality, morality, morbidity, manners, claims of beauty or justice, proof vs belief; I play with such frames of reference to upend them. I use shady humor, self-deprecation, figures in open ended unresolvable states, posing serendipitous yet contradictory combinations, confounding, conflating, and reimagining expectations, teasing at habitual conditions as a strategy toward thinking about ourselves as selves.

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I use the plasticity of clay to invent absurd characters which embody lived or fantastical conundrums. I recognize mental or physical states projected onto the work, like an impulse to mismatch characters’ arms when experiencing with nerve dysfunction. Externalizing these I find an amusing release. I am the trickster, and these are my subjects as such, but no harm done, just clay cartoons. I engage with clay in the spirit of play. I like to surprise myself with it and making myself laugh feels like success.​​​

 

Monsters are no longer simply scary. A rumination on cosmology becomes a topological experiment applied to a man in a living room. Another confounded character has has bucket excavator appendages. Monsters I remake to be something other than just scary. Cut limbs hold up cut flowers for us to regard. Many figures are multi-sided or multi-faced. Many sleep, dreaming of us.

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​My approach to art has always been experimental in media, concepts, and methods.  Despite all the experience and confidence I have working in other forms, I have settled on clay as my focus. Part of this is simply practical; I value the long creative life that clay offers. I can use it safely and effectively despite aging and physical limitations. I cannot say that of power tools.

Yet even if that were not true, clay is for me the most direct and full-contact means of expression I have had. It is infinitely malleable, and I feel empowered to make anything I can imagine or observe. Still, clay will surprise me and make me laugh. More than with any other medium, my mind and hands are in synch and I am deeply focused; my wife says I cannot hear anything else when I am working.

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I engage with clay in the spirit of play, finding pleasure, energy, and discovery in the tension between improvisation and concept formation. To this end I often experiment with tactics like speed, gravity, thinness, size, or dryness. I destabilize my own skills and expectations to inject unpredictability, demand discovery, and refocus attention. 

 

​With my hands on clay, I observe the form and movement of the material, discovering what it is to become or recognizing how it corresponds with or improves upon any idea or image I began from. These interactions with the material keep me open to changing and this develops into something like a dialogue with myself enacted through my handling of the clay. As such this is a layered and interesting mental exercise for me, up to and including a way toward thinking about thinking.

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