When realizing these works, I feel I have the responsibility to avoid social urgency and do work which is beyond personal pathos. Conditions of stillness and a state of permanence are my guides. Steeped in history and myth, each work aims to become a site for contemplation and temporary refuge. Of the themes I address, monumentality is a major one. A monumentality not of the authoritarian or oppressive genre, but one that links and encapsulates structures from periods when sculpture, architecture, and landscape were one. Hopefully this dive into the past will offer us a glimpse of a fresh visual syntax.
It is critical that the material I use predates any cultural or historical reference addressed. A substance incompatible with the very notion of modernity. To this end, I discovered in slate a highly complex medium whose layered structure seems to parallel my thought processes. As a stone, slate reveals its fluid origins, yet it also possesses qualities of both wood and metal, and its stratified nature is geology manifest. Each fragment I use is a small but complete site where veils of civilization are embedded in its strata. It is to this cool sanctuary that our icons may return to for the substance of their form.
