Time Stands Still exhibition

We all mourn the loss of life and cultural heritage as the result of war and violence.  I am sickened by the images of people whose lives, livelihoods, and homes have been destroyed by violence and greed, abuse of power and shifting governments. I see images of our common cultural heritage destroyed by the same forces, or entropy, and grieve their loss. I think a lot about history, and how our history is a cycle of human invention, creation, transition and destruction. As humans, we build, change the landscape, move on, leave behind, build again. My work represents that cycle. I use the patterns we see in art and artifacts around the world to create order on my rough, eroded, forms. I make layers of work, stacks of artifacts, and bury the lower pieces, as so much history is buried, never to be seen again.  

When I imagine our history, I see a column, stacked with sections that are slices of time, some glorious, or skewed, some ambitious, some collapsed. I love the reality of an ancient object, one that has been seen in varied manifestations through time; once perhaps useful, then a discard, then a discovery by an archaeologist, an object of study, then swooned over in a museum, then maybe again, found lying on its side in a storage room, or on the floor of a gallery, being grouped with other objects by a curator who is piecing together another, more complicated story.
My work draws from and responds to motifs, patterns, and structures found through history and pre-history that rebound into contemporary art and life. Our vitality and our mortality are part of the equation. I work primarily with clay and wood because the materials change through time, much like our bodies, our species, our culture. We walk in circles, creating magnificent cities, reaching for something better, leaving it behind. Out of this, I create beauty, and memory too.