Monument To Childhood Sculpture

Growing up in an abusive home, the happiest moments of my life were escaping to my grandparent’s farm. One of my favorite things to do was climb and the best thing to climb was the big knobby tires of the tractor. It’s one of the purest memories of my childhood. One day as I looked into the back yard at the tire swing I’d hung for my son, I thought about how different his life experience is from my childhood. At that moment, this piece crystallized in my mind. This work is the connecting point between the little boy that I was, the man and father I became, and the values I am trying to instill in my own son. My work disrupts typical associations of glass by making work that communicate ideas of weightiness and mass, or that feature raw, pitted surfaces that can speak to ideas about entropy and loss. As an artist, I am most drawn to the fact that glass is at once visually light, but physically dense. While I view myself as a sculptor, I embrace glass as a material for artistic expression because I find it a valuable metaphor for human agency, imagination, and will. Glass is abundant in our daily lives, but rare in nature because through five millennia, people have found that seemingly random ingredients combined at impossibly high temperatures will create a material with properties unlike any other on earth. An essential part of our humanity is the ability to envision that which does not exist, and then set our actions on redefining reality. This intrinsic connection between our minds and hands allow the objects we create to reflect our inner selves and to be a catalyst for profound experience. My most recent body of work explores issues of growing up in a physically and sexually abusive home and the nature of self-determination.