Sculpture

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Resulting from my love of architecture and study of Buddhist philosophy, my sculptural works explore the subtle, paradoxical relationships between seemingly contradictory aspects of life, human society, and the natural world. They invite the viewer to question dichotomies such as those between exterior and interior space, industrial and organic material, containment and liberation, obtrusiveness and receptivity, rigidity and movement. 

They do this mainly by contrasting and integrating industrial manufactured materials like plywood, plastic, and metal with natural, organic found materials like leaves, jute, and feathers. Man-made materials are used to form a frame or enclosure, and natural materials are arranged with impasto to create a collage. The 3-dimensional “paintings” or painted sculptures likewise blur the categories between painting and sculpture, especially those hung on a wall with an oversized “frame” becoming a dominant and integral part of the piece as it constrains the freedom and wildness of the natural world or animal impulses within (See Icarus and Hortus Conclusus, for example). 

The overall forms of the structures draw from the minimalist movement in general. Yet the emotive and subjective works of Egon Schiele, Jackson Pollock, and other abstract expressionists, against which minimalists rebelled, also influenced my pieces, primarily in the coarse, intricate movement of impastoed collage. Other specific influences are Anselm Kiefer and Andy Goldsworthy, who employed materials like lead, straw, tar, and sand or living matter like grass, leaves, and flowers in their works; and Lee Bontecou, whose sculpture likewise “straddles the lines between painting and sculpture, mechanical and organic, and inviting and threatening.”* Drawing from these sources, my sculptures strive to provoke thought and feeling from the viewer with a dramatic, imaginative combination of seemingly antithetical elements. 

* “Lee Bontecou: Untitled, 1961.” MoMA. 2022. Museum of Modern Art. Gallery Label from “Collection 1940s-1970s” Exhibit, 2019. Accessed 23 Oct 2022. <https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81442>