"Blood Shell" Sculpture

Much of my practice includes collecting and preparing wood from local trees. When I began this process years ago, the material came from friends or neighbors who cut down trees and offered the wood to me. Now I have many trees on my property that may drop large branches. Most require careful and regular pruning. Recently I was forced to take down a sugar maple that was rotting from the inside out. This provided me with a considerable amount material that is dense and quite excellent. It also provided much of the material used to make “Red Fence.” The scroll form in the piece was made with wood I saved from pruning pear trees some years ago. I’d like to think that my work functions like poetry, except it uses forms instead of words to evoke thoughts and feelings that lie deep and barely realized.