I believe that sculpture is meant to be touched, that visual perception alone will always be incomplete as a means of access to this craft. Physical contact, even among the inanimate, is intrinsically intimate. In holding stone, we make ourselves vulnerable to a material which exists in a realm largely unfamiliar and foreign to our ways of being. I hope to offer some access, however fragile, to this mode of existence through my sculptural work.
The totems are my most current line of inquiry in this respect, and they go farthest in an attempt to form a connection between disparate forms of life through their form and function. They are deeply spiritual objects, but they retain a certain intimacy to the human body through their size and surface treatment, which is smooth and soft on the hands when the pieces are held from below. Such sculptures do not just represent singular pieces of stone, but attempt to embody the geological phenomena that formed them, as well as those which continue to shape the earth today.
Each stone is directly carved by hand with chisels, rifflers, and the occasional drill. I will often sketch the sculpture before I begin, and there are times when a small clay model is made to refine the form in three dimensions before cutting into stone. I am also developing techniques to eliminate waste and use all of the material from the work, even that which does not make it into the final sculpture. Excess alabaster, for example, is calcined into plaster for sculptural use later on.