​My approach to art has always been experimental in media, concepts, and methods.  Despite all the experience and confidence I have working in other forms, I have settled on clay as my focus. Part of this is simply practical; I value the long creative life that clay offers. I can use it safely and effectively despite aging and physical limitations. I cannot say that of power tools.

Yet even if that were not true, clay is for me the most direct and full-contact means of expression I have had. It is infinitely malleable, and I feel empowered to make anything I can imagine or observe. Still, clay will surprise me and make me laugh. More than with any other medium, my mind and hands are in synch and I am deeply focused; my wife says I cannot hear anything else when I am working.

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I engage with clay in the spirit of play, finding pleasure, energy, and discovery in the tension between improvisation and concept formation. To this end I often experiment with tactics to destabilize my expectations. For instance, I may lean hard into concrete physical properties challenging my ability to handle and form clay like speed, gravity, thinness, size, dryness. I set simple temporary rules for this purpose, like, “make a pinch pot using ten pounds of clay,” and, “do it in a short amount of time so that gravity becomes a strong influence.” That specific instruction, in fact, resulted in a cookie jar of a clown upside down on his flattened head. Such tactics inject unpredictability, demand discovery, and focus attention.

While I learn from the challenge of stretching my ability to handle the material, I always keep on a very thick clay slip modified with vinegar and, sometimes, fiber. It also provides a ready means of repair in most situations, so I need not fear taking risks. Furthermore, it invites new construction approaches; I have found I can use it to join thin hardened clay elements into self-supporting structures and to sheath them with a range of interesting textures.

 

​With my hands on clay, I observe the form and movement of the material, discovering what it is to become or recognizing how it corresponds with or improves upon any idea or image I began from. These interactions with the material keep me open to changing and this develops into something like a dialogue with myself enacted through my handling of the clay. As such this is a layered and interesting mental exercise for me, up to and including a way toward thinking about thinking.

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I use the plasticity of clay to invent absurd characters which embody personal or imagined existential problems. Externalizing these I find an amusing release. I am the trickster, and these are my subjects as such, but no harm done, just clay cartoons. A rumination on cosmology becomes a topological experiment applied to a man in a living room; he sticks his head through the wall of this little universe, and, surprise, it reenters the room by way of his ass. Another confounded character has feet and hands formed as the opposing sides of a double bucket excavator. Monsters I remake to be something other than just scary. Cut limbs hold up cut flowers for us to regard. Many of my figures are two-sided, each revealing a different face. 

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Other times I recognize mental or physical states unconsciously projected onto the work, like my impulse to mismatch characters’ arms at a time I was dealing with nerve dysfunction.
 

​Serious thoughts in surprising and sometimes humorous packages are a hallmark of my art. In art I enjoy the freedom to mess around with what one cannot easily say or do with one’s own body or in polite society, both the beautiful and profane, and to allow others to see this. But why?

At any given moment, tacit physical and cultural assumptions ground our sense-making routines without being unpacked for investigation. Body sensation, body image, sex, mortality, morality, morbidity, manners, claims of beauty or justice, proof vs belief; I play with such frames of reference to upend them. I use shady humor, self-deprecation, figures in open ended unresolvable states, posing serendipitous yet contradictory combinations, confounding, conflating, and reimagining expectations, teasing at habitual conditions as a strategy toward thinking about ourselves as selves.