TOP:  Installation View, Saddleback College
BOTTOM:  Detail of Maya

Slow Form

Some objects inhabit space with a density of being. The influence of such an object's material existence extends beyond its boundaries into the surrounding space, insinuating its presence into the gap between viewer and viewed.

This is often the case with objects that have evolved over long periods of time. They command the space around them with an existence that curiously parallels our own, because their density derives not so much from physical mass as from an intense participation in time. Like the viewer, they have been shaped by an alchemy of happenstance and chance occurrence.  Both are compact histories of cause and effect, of one action arising out of countless others.

I remember being fascinated as a child at a news story about the world's largest ball of string. Knowing what I knew then of the time it took to carefully ball kite string, I was awed by the extravagance of time spent in what seemed  a pointless act, except that its outcome, the ball of string itself, filled my imagination. Huge and dense and marvelously textured, I could sense even from the grainy newspaper photo that it had great presence, brooding and silent as the egg of a colossus, filled with potential energy.

I pursue this kind of density using processes that involve an intensity of labor. I build "slow forms," or objects that have been generated by the accumulation of countless small acts. They evolve through a series of information loops, a kind of call and response between maker, material and environment. Usually they begin simply, as random points or lines or thoughts. Connections are made, and through them relationships evolve and patterns emerge. Each act of connection is crucial, serving as a medium where past and future are joined. However numerous or small, I view each act as entirely unique. Even so, each act is shaped by what came before, and each will influence what will come next. Eventually, the singularity of these acts blurs to memory as they fold into the emerging form. Through repetition and endless variation, an interior logic unfolds. This accretion of events yields an architecture built of small acts over time.