I have worked with wood for more than 40 years. As a child I explored a variety of media and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. As a young adult, I fell in love with wood scraps from a nearby lumber yard, sought to understand how the physical “constructed” world was put together, and proceeded to develop and hone my skills–building cabinets, custom furniture, decks, additions, and new houses. In a “woo woo” moment, the wood asked me to reveal its nature as three-dimensional chunks rather than as flat boards, which meant it had to move to walls! My furniture and sculptures have been shown in galleries and shows in Wisconsin, Oregon, and North Carolina, and my work has been featured in Fine Woodworking Magazine.
In the mid-1990’s, I led the design and construction of a 24-townhouse eco-community on four acres–essentially creating a very large sculpture of an entirely different kind!
Now I love bringing to life sculptural expressions of organizational purpose and personal vision. Wood, with its warm broad appeal, is the perfect medium for evocative compositions that make universal ideals tangible. Some wall sculptures combine 15 or more types of woods, and they all seem to get along with each other.
A visual language for each sculpture emerges from the combination of the approved design, the endless variations of shapes in my mind, and what each individual piece of wood says to me as I work. Each sculpture is a 3-D puzzle, uniting me as maker, the chunks of wood, and viewers in a metaphorical inquiry.
