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Welcome
My current work, The Planet Series
The human body is a mysterious landscape of spellbinding secrets. It is our own personal planet, with inner and outer wilderness, and questions we cannot answer. If we look outside ourselves, to our planet Earth, and then to the planets and cosmic objects of our solar system and beyond, as seen by the Hubble telescope, the wilderness is unspeakably vast.
The endless photographs available to us now show that outer space and the things in it are untouchable and unkind. The planets outside Earth bring us dreadful, broken landscapes with extremes in temperature and atmosphere impossible to imagine, and instantly hostile to our very lives. We are surrounded by a vast and alien desert, with any intelligent life far, far away and beyond our reach for a long time to come. We are surrounded by a physical universe in which can be felt a chilling and unsettling indifference to us.
I have been studying these photographs. As an artist, I am using them as fuel for my new work. I have been struck by how the fierce and silent desert landscapes out in space throw us right back into ourselves. We are seekers who, through a kind of pilgrimage and ascent, land back where we started, at home here, in our minds.
The “Planet Series,” my new body of work, is a “solar system” of sizable ceramic figures, each with textural surfaces referring to landscapes on planetary bodies, and new information from space. These new pieces are influenced by the frontality and silence of work by ancient Egyptian sculptors, to whom I owe a compositional debt. My new work is a way for me to grapple with a reality so large, and somehow bring it down to human size. (That is certainly something that the Egyptians did as well.) I will be working on the “Planet Series” for some time to come.
Through our new technology, the vast landscape of space has been brought home to us for the first time in human history. Our sense of place, and the size of our imaginations, has had to stretch to include it. I see my current work as seating the human body in these new surroundings. |
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