“Earth Bones and Spirit Stones:

Studio Explorations in Stone, Wood, Metal and Wax”

As an artist, I am constantly reinventing myself through intense studio experimentation. For the past several years I have focused on making small experimental sculptures out of beeswax and salvaged discards from my garden and neighborhood, as a means to push the boundaries of my creative ideas, medium and process. My head has always been crowded with ideas and images, both ancient and contemporary. As a Virginian, it is no accident that images of past and present, memory and imagination overlap in my work, nor that current media stories and pictures of domestic and civil wars, and of natural disasters, have resonance in my mind and studio. But it is my physical connection to my materials, and to nature itself, that gives voice and commentary to these images of loss, pain, transformation and renewal. My art begins and ends with the transitory flotsam, the artifact, the remnant – be it root, stone, rusted metal or beeswax.

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Shakespeare, The Tempest

Wabi-Sabi is a beauty of things imperfect,
Impermanent and incomplete.
Leonard Koren, Wabi Sabi

Earth Bones: Alianthus

Earth Bones: Alianthus, back view

Earth Bones: Ariadne, front view

Earth Bones: Ariadne, detail view