Philosophy is littered with physical metaphors for how the world exists and how we think about it.   Bachelard, in the Poetics of Space , says "philosophers, when confronted with inside and outside, think in terms of being and non-being. . . metaphysics is rooted in an implicit geometry which. . . confers spatiality on thought."(p. 212) My recent sculptures are philosophical interventions that acknowledge and try to mend dichotomies of thinking through the interplay of geometric forms.   They explore some possible shapes of the structure of thinking.

I try to imagine the physical nature of various grids to see the different qualities of their structural influence on our thinking.    I use frayed screen, hand-made wire grids, and dye-soaked cheesecloth as physical metaphors acknowledging this arbitrary way of ordering the world.   But ephemeral and implicit geometries are slippery.   Alan Watts talks about the first time a fisherman looked through his fishing net and saw the world broken up into a grid. The arbitrary categories that flowed from that accidental, though inevitable, juxtaposition are haunting.   This ordering is further confused by ancient western philosophers, who conflated a dimensionless geometric point with the smallest atom of matter.   You can't build a physical body from dimensionless points.   I resolve this conundrum by giving abstract geometry dimension and shape.   I roll thin lines into spheres and make thick, round plaster splashes that barely adhere to erratic grids.    I try to fool the disorder into thinking it is order by using fraying, barely discernable grid wire structures. From another point of view, the arbitrary order created by the fishing net is it's own kind of disorder.   

John Locke imagined human beings as blank slates the environment writes on, but ignored the actual slate as a structure.   I interpret his blank slate as paper because the transparent, flexible, absorbent qualities of paper work well as a metaphor for mind.   I fold the paper into a grid that orders the flimsy nature of otherwise unsupported material, then freeze the shapes with exoskeletons of epoxy.   Any plaster unnecessary to the support of the paper structures is chopped away from their foundations, leaving only enough room to support the existing idea.   The rigidizing epoxy is a metaphor the invisible structures that freeze people's ideas into rigid, toppling forms.   The seeming ephemerality and fragility of the sculpture, Tabula Rasa , is undermined by the influence of the paper form on it's solid, though compliant, foundation.

I stitch fictitious maps, painted on transparent fabric, onto 3 dimensional spherical shapes that twist, shrink and morph into elongated abstract structures. My asymmetrical and non-uniform pliable structures use wire to suggest the idea of longitude and latitude.   I want each shape to work as a model for a large territorial space and as a metaphor for the self.

New Atlantis is a layered map that uses space to experiment with the past, present, and future.    Oasis stretches blue fabric to suggest water within the spatial twists of the exposed, suspended shape.

Accelerated Perspective II mimics the surface of the earth.   It is a reorganized landscape that seeks to examine our relationship to nature, a relationship that is increasingly overpowered by a desire to believe we have control over nature.   I wanted to find a visual analog for the logic of this thought process.   I linked an imposed system of perspective drawing with artificial materials that represent nature and then stretched the result out into 3 dimensional space.

I used the perspective drawing rule of depth scale (the further objects are from us in space, the smaller they appear) as a device to break space into unequal, descending segments.   By shifting depth scale from 2 dimensions into 3 dimensions, space seems to shrink or stretch depending on your relationship to the piece, establishing a visual analog that describes a gap between how things are and how we think things are.

The squares of gradually descending size are cut out of astroturf and knitted together with white plastic ties.   These ties hold the squares together but also keep them separate.   The contrast of the ties against the green of the astroturf changes as the squares get larger.   There is a place where the two elements compete, but the borders of change are smooth and not readily identifiable.    The shift from the reality of the natural world to the reality of how we think about it is also fluid.   This shift is a product of the complex system of nature merging with the systems we have for thinking about it. Reorganizing the landscape by overtly applying a visual organizational system reveals the limitations of the system and records the limits of our thinking.

I think of these two installations as "making rooms".   Both as architectural spaces and gallery spaces, but also as in somehow claiming the space to literally give myself room to work.   The square and the cube imply a paradigm that excludes much of what I consider important.   Taking the given architecture as the classic cube, I try to disassemble it through a single repetitious gesture.   In Caution , it is repeatedly taping each plastic square to the wall.   In Another Ivory , it is the repeated gesture of smearing the uncured soap on the fabric, giving the fabric its' texture, and also the single and more calculated gesture of pulling the soap skin so it appears to be slipping off the walls.   The disassembly happens in the competition between the shape of the room and the materials used to give it its' skin.