About
Artist Statement
Much of the significance of the artistic process is to be found in the wonder of its many actions--in cutting, shaping, corrupting, affixing, drilling, polishing, patinating, distorting, balancing, threading, submerging, casting, punching, overlaying.
Each one of these actions constitutes a plan, an attempt to change an aspect of a thing into something else, but these plans are almost always disrupted by the sometimes radical autonomy of the materials themselves. Artistic media have different proclivities, different temperaments, different sites of native belligerence or caprice. Copper hardens as you work it, glass crumbles under uneven pressures, and wax gets weirdly greasy on a humid day. Acid sometimes seems to acquire an appetite from what it feeds on. Opalescent glass looks like stone when not illuminated, and like colored paper when backlit. Clay smells like earth, and radically changes its behavior given changes in moisture content. Barrel kilns and vapor chambers sometimes produce never-to-be-seen-again effects as they acquire their own particular history of interacting with different materials.
As the actions in the studio are so various, and the strange proclivities of the media so pervasive, it is perhaps to be expected that the central governing dynamic in the studio--the dynamic that binds the artist to the studio, or at least, binds me to mine--is surprise.
Sometimes, the surprise is direct and incorrigible proof that the artist has erred--either from thoughtlessness, laziness, or lack of imagination. Hopefully, these doesn't happen too often. Smaller, less negative surprises occur constantly, and cause one to slightly alter one's techniques and tactics. Even though each surprise constitutes a change of plan, they are almost always positive, as they underscore the vitality, the irrepressible autonomy of the artistic medium.
Sometimes--occasionally--one can jostle, seduce, or trick the medium to express some kind of elusive wonder, a kind of plain-clothes miracle that one had perhaps intuited, but had not forecasted precisely or in detail. In this way, one's greatest successes are surprises in that they transcend the intuitive guesses that gave them rise.