TO CONSPIRE WITH NATURE

Having worked many years in sculptural forms that respond to urban environments, in settings full of the activity of commerce and corporate vitality, I have recently refocused my attention to the larger environment, the eco-system, whose maintenance and survival supports the firmament upon which even the urban landscape is dependant.

My large public sculptures are composed of fabricated and painted metal, producing architectonic metaphors of evocative moments found in nature. The new work marks a further development in both form and content, in my personal response to the natural environment. I call this new work The Tellurians, a word meaning "arising from the earth".

The medium has changed radically, from fabricating aluminum and steel, to restructuring organic materials from nature, and changed also in scale from twenty feet to a smaller, more accessible format. The source materials now consist of the roots, the actual sticks, branches, and earthen detritus' collected in forests and wetlands from my travels throughout the country. I then restructure these clumps of natural decaying forms to produce a transformation in the materials, to form anthropomorphic figures of moss-laden wonder that become cautionary narrators concerned with the fragility of the eco-system.

The pragmatic use of these organic materials to fire the form is an appropriate utilization that is consistent with the solution for the problem of the works' fragile "permanence." I treat the materials with various forms of wood hardeners, fillers, and polyurethane coatings, while also using bronze rod that keep these figures together. This results in dramatic weathered materializations of the psyche, rising as if from the earth in primordial grace, that are at once Aboriginal, yet urgently contemporary, creating majestic animations of the essence of nature, moments and cautions from a pre-conscious memory of a pristine environment. Some times, I have caste these sculptural organic materializations in bronze, making them unique one of a kind sculptures.