MURMUR 7 Sculpture

This recent work represents two paths of concern that have opened up new vocabularies for me to mine deeper fundamental roots in both sculpture and drawing. The sculptures are made of gauze fabric: applied, formed, stabilized and painted. They are of human scale, shown under small amounts of direct light. Intimate, quiet and direct, they create a close physical relationship with the viewer, which is central to experiencing them. The work integrates painting, sculpture and illumination, three key elements of my experience. These sculptures emerged from a probe into how human experience is marked by trauma, personal or communal, and, in enduring them, the very nature of one’s physical and emotional self is altered. They confront the viewer not with the heaviness of a mass, but a simple rippling of cloth. These works are fragile, yet they emit a presence that seems challenging, irrefutable, vital in some sense; neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but a means for understanding an essential reality. The drawing series emerged from another probe, one related to questioning the origins of the making of line and mark, well before they evolved into language and art. For me line has a desire for freedom, and mark a will distinct to itself, each with a life of its own. And so they and I have a relationship with one another, not hierarchical but a dialogue. Drawings, partly erased, drawn over, added to, arrive at images that begin to define a significance, not so much describable as sensed; a meaning not yet known; the beginnings of a form of speech.