Inside-Baseball-Sunday

From an interview with Art Is Moving
 http://artismoving.blogspot.com/

Can you talk about your sculpture?

My work is rooted in physical and poetic understandings of nature, (and I mean nature in the sense of an inter-connected web of people, places, and things.) I place a special emphasis on the relationship of these understandings to my own emotional life. The invisible life of emotions is fascinating to me, and while I’ve used many materials over the years, wood, intensely familiar and knowable, remains the best-suited material for constructing three-dimensional objects that serve as metaphors for human stories. For me, the most prominent – and interesting – characters in these stories are unfulfilled desires, fear, and the expression of a longing for safety and comfort in all its manifestations. I make vessel or “basket” informed work – pieces I call bascauda, from Latin meaning kettle or table-vessel – and think of these as keeping places for past remembrances. I also make work I callmembrana – from Latin meaning parchment or that which covers members of the body – these works recall boats and/or shields, essentially objects that cover and protect the self. My work method involves a lot of laminated wood construction, weaving, binding, etc. I’m drawn to very low-tech assembly methods because I like the direct connection with the materials. I use machines and current technologies, but simply can’t stand the “distance” this puts between me and my work. I like to think of the layers of wood like layers of memories accumulated over time that, like memory, possess both a sense of certainty and a sense of the uncertain.

Behind my work

Amusement and passion for organic form—trees, plants, people, animals—anything that grows in a biological sense (as oppose to pure-gravity formed structures like buildings or piles and as oppose to configurations that derive from industrial design) are the interests that drive my work. My work has been a slow release from dependency upon armature/skeleton, toward objects that utilize balloon or shell construction in order to support weight and formal organizations. With this, I have de-emphasized the use of hardware or external mechanical devices (think hinge or nail.)

The formal organization of my work is inspired from natural rhythms and cycles—breath, seasons, the repetitive pulse of modern life—and despite a lack of affinity for the mechanical world, the work also re-presents mechanical processes and functions through organic references. The result is what can be called meta-machinery, or, a combination of the mechanical and the organic (think Mary Shelly's, "Frankenstein")

My attraction to curves, arcs, or any line that signifies the existence of the third dimension, I equate with a rooted interest in human brain function, or consciousness. Why do we think what we do, or rather, how do we think. Our thinking, living experience, is more than words alone can address, and my goal is to capture this intangibility in form.


The approach I take to constructing these forms ranges from solo studio practices, ever informed by interaction with habitat, to community constructed forms whereby, groups of people complete a form I began. Both approaches begin with a "wire-frame" armature (http://www.paverpolaustralia.com/images/wireframe.jpg.) My forms center on snakes, vessels, tubes, and so on, upon which I weave strips of wood lathe. As the lathe is incorporated into the form, the wire frame gives way to the forces of the process. The final form is transformed into one that exists in harmony with all forces.


This makes me think of sea creatures, whose forms are also proscribed by a balance between the structure of form and external moments. However, our own non-aquatic atmosphere exerts a pressure upon all organic/mechanical form and hence, I consider this a related realm to my work.

With this in mind, I envision the context of my work to be quite wide. From dense urban areas—both indoor and outdoor, including both—to venues like fields, state or federal parks and reserves.


The vessel, no matter its function, represents trust. Gas tanks, cereal boxes, buildings and even our own bodies are granted a trust in their ability to function typically hard-won by entities such as presidential candidates, lovers, or friends. As such, I see vessels as pure examples of what a culture values.