2005-2009

 

 

I would like to offer a few comments about this sculpture.

 

How it performs as an artwork and how it might engage you is beyond my words

and possibly comprehension. How it is - the way it is - drew on so many

elements from my present and past, I seem capable of only talking circuitously from one to the other,

always leading, eventually, to the rich, deep mass which is simply my creative source, like humus.

 

What I want to talk about, though,

is the effect creating this piece meant for my survival.

 

I can’t imagine that, by the Summer of ‘05, my life was any more twisted up than many others’,

but, perhaps true for those people too, my situation was

the first time

I’d encountered such an implosion of harm, never fully deflected by therapy,

self-help or community. Left like this, I discovered, perhaps slowly, that in the end,

I, like we, am here with no one else to bow against the wind and not give way.

 

 

captures exactly though not completely

my feeling of having the person I knew myself to be

pre-empted by a force that had absolutely no care for me. At the time uncommitted emerged,

it seemed my rational mind had been disconnected from processing my senses

and regulating my physical being. I could read and discuss, but that had

no relevance to the co-ordination of my thoughts & actions...

 

...with the exception of my creative voice, reassigned, then, by my therapist to capture this self same truth.

 

Finishing this image, even as a wax model, I came to realize that I would win this struggle.

Giving my enigma a specific form felt like time had seen what I did

and had finally slowed,

affording me my own breath & tears.