I enjoy working in a quiet and subversive way.
The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.
Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it.
I think that I’m always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see.
One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist’s entire life. What I’ve learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.
There are occasions when I have moved boulders, but I’m reluctant to, especially ones that have been rooted in a place for many years.
People also leave presence in a place even when they are no longer there.
The early firings contained many stones.
Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.
Everything has the energy of its making inside it.
I take the opportunity each day offers.
Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form.
I go way beyond just the wood and stone but to the process of growth and farming and the tensions between the two.
The stones tear like flesh, rather than breaking. Although what happens is violent, it is a violence that is in stone. A tear is more unnerving than a break.
I’m cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames.
Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured.
I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it’s become firewood. And there’s this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.
Abandoning the project was incredibly stressful after having gone through the process of building the room, installing the kiln, collecting the stones, sitting with the kiln day and night as it came to temperature, experiencing the failures.
A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels.
If you’ve ever come across a tree that you’ve lived with for many years and then one day it’s blown over, there’s incredible shock and violence about that.