This is the first time I have worked with wood, and it has been an enjoyable experience with a substantial learning curve. During the past decade, most of my art has been made while sitting down at a table, from a cerebral vantage point. In the last couple of years, I have discovered musical performance, which is bodily and cathartic. So I was curious to experience the process of a more bodily mode of visual creation. At first, working with wood and learning about the required tools was fully absorbing, and I was happy to let the content follow. Letting the content follow is actually how I operate in most of my artistic pursuits: first, I set some parameters, and then allow myself to improvise freely within them. My drawings are unified by material (colored pencil and ink,) humor, and a highly graphic mode of representation that hovers at the brink of illustration. The imagery, however, is dictated by whim. My musical performances require the use of a laptop for playback of pre-composed backing tracks; however, in live performance I improvise with another musician on top of these tracks.
Applying this method of structured play to the creation of these sculptures was not as hard as I thought it would be. In fact, I took to it quite readily, and knew right away that it was the right thing to be doing at the right time. Improvisational ideas occurred more monolithically than they do with drawing, and more gradually, over a period of months. They would make themselves known through minor content adjustments-- i.e. "if this form slanted at 45 degrees, the immediate psychological impression of this piece would change," etc. I tended to think exclusively in terms of psychological impressions. From the beginning, I thought of each sculpture as part of a larger family, with its share of a family’s implications. I also enjoyed quantifying them in terms of animal sizes-- "dog sized", "deer sized." At first, I was just looking for synergy between the shapes and the space they inhabit, which is not that unusual. However-- and this is perhaps where improvisational fumbling crosses wires with careful scientific measuring-- I instinctively started to look for a precise combination of emotional affects. I think my underlying intention with this show was to create a family of Golems. Each one is a stand-in; a marker encoded with a will of its own as well as with the desire to transgress it. But try as they might, these pieces do not meld into a whole. Even they are not free from the self-reflexivity to which we human sized animals defer.