"Torso Emerging" Sculpture

I start with a piece of cold hard steel. Using a forge, I heat the bar to 2000 degrees. Yellow-hot steel moves like clay. I cannot touch the material, so I use tools such as tongs, hammers, fullers and chisels that I have also shaped out of steel. By understanding ancient processes, I push toward something new. We are controlled by our perceptions. My work has always been an experiment in altering my own perception of what a bar of steel represents. I formed the hot steel and as it cooled, I would catch a glimpse of stretching skin. When the pressure of the drift expanded the hole, I could see fat swelling into a breast. My figures are shaped from the perfectly dimensioned bar that comes from one of our most historically important industries. Innovation and depredation have propelled us forward as a species, but our greatest and most terrifying strength is the ability to talk each other into things. Coming out of and flowing into the original stock, these figures tell your mind to see a person. But the person is also a piece of steel connected just as we are to our own complicity in the fallout of our ingenuity.