I love working with the expressive capacity of the human form.  Bodies always tell the truth.  Inner emotions and life experiences always show in how we sit, stand and move.  Bodies store these things in our muscles and tissues, revealing them in posture and gesture.

Part of my work is exploration, sculpting the body as a way to delve more deeply into the human condition.  For these pieces, I tap my own inner senses of body and feeling.  I find within myself a place and a pose that feel meaningful, even if I don’t know what it is.  I then flow that feeling out through my arms and hands until it manifests outside of myself, and I can witness it.  These figures often emerge with more honesty and nuance than any expectation I had, and I learn about myself.  I also appreciate that others may find that the pieces stir something in their own emotions, since we all share the human condition. 

I make other works to be intentional statements about specific emotions and cause-related messages.  I reach inside for strong and often difficult feelings, expose them in my work, and allow bottled-up places to flow.  I also make works to protest about issues of unfairness and injustice.  For these pieces, I have adapted the Greco-Roman stela, an ancient form of public monument, combining inscriptions with sculpture to put my protests in tangible form. 

All of my figures are ceramic, and I often finish them by a process called pit firing — burying and then burning the pieces in sawdust in a trench, where they smolder for two or three days.  While I cannot control how the clay carbonizes in the atmosphere of the pit, my figures take on a range of rich, earthy creams, grays, browns and blacks.  Most often, the pit gives figures back to me with their expressive qualities heightened.  It seems fitting to work hard at building my forms and then let go of them for their final transformation.