Here are ten forms, held in tension as five pairs. Thin threads connect them, symbolizing a mutually-dependent system, but the interdependence is also literal, each stabilizes the others to allow them to stand, poised in space. Removing any one of the ten would bring the others down. This is the interdependence that is often hidden, but is at the heart of so much around us.

In my studio, each of the parts was connected to the others only by thin strings, such that each was held in tension and enabled the others to balance, unsecured. That sort of delicate counterbalance isn’t possible outside with wind and rain, so these are secured to the ground.

This is a work I created during my one-year fellowship at the Château de la Napoule in southern France, as part of being awarded the 2022-2023 Prix Henry Clews from the La Napoule Art Foundation.

This sculpture is sited in the Château de La Napoule’s large, gothic-era dining room. At various points in history before the time of recorded music, musicians would sit in a small room on the other side of these three small, arched openings shown at the top of these pictures, hidden from view. The music they played would emanate out of these windows and down into the dining area for the enjoyment of the diner guests below.

I loved this story, and thought about how an already-hidden history like this is becoming even more distant and intangible as technologies like smartphones make each subsequent generation take instantaneous and ubiquitous access to music for granted. I wanted to find a way to visually tell this story by creating a gestural, sculptural form ’emanating from above,’ as music would, to make visible just the smallest hint of this long-gone history — not through any literal interpretation of music, but just by hinting at it… by trying to create similar emotions in present-day viewers as might have been felt by those dining in this room decades or centuries ago.

What is this old stone structure? It’s a bridge, but also a tunnel, yet it has no real function in this location. It’s ornamental, its main purpose is to create an experience of passing through and over spaces, from one place to another. I started with this observation, and created a sculpture with the same multiple natures: mine is a form to be passed through, over, and under. Both structures are made to provide an experience of transitioning, where that experience itself is more important than what comes before or after.

I watch visitors walk through the near-circle of the form, stop, look up, look down, then return to the ground and pass through the stone structure, again looking up. My hope is that they experience and focus on those transitions in a way that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

The stone bridge uses substantial weight to achieve this; the sculpture uses as little mass as possible, belonging more to the air than to the earth, thanks to its cantilevered and suspended structure.

In memory of Philippe Lefevre
This is a work I created during my one-year fellowship at the Château de la Napoule in southern France, as part of being awarded the 2022-2023 Prix Henry Clews from the La Napoule Art Foundation.

This is a different type of piece for me… yet it’s still an exploration of the same themes I’m so interested in — same language, different dialect, perhaps.

This wood came from the branch of a huge, ancient tree in the gardens of the Château de La Napoule that came down during a huge storm that spring. Its smooth outside was such an interesting juxtaposition to the savagely torn (yet strangely compelling) inside, yet both are inseparably part of the same entity. I saw in the two fractured ends a visual recording of the immense energy of the wind that tore it down, and in this work I try to reveal that.

I rearranged the two halves of the break, rotating one in relation to the other and perching it precariously tip-to-tip in an attempt to bring back to the form some of the sense of tension, of vulnerability, that was in the branch all along and which that particular wind storm revealed that day.

The tear also uncovered a rich interior world hidden beneath its skin — the gestural beauty of the grain, twisting and turning, gnarled and interlocking. There was motion in the wood, not only in the shape that resulted from how it was fractured from the tree, but in the grain of the wood inside, as well. I wanted to explore, deepen, and accentuate all of these qualities with my own interventions.

Early in my fellowship in France, I spent lots of time in the château’s gardens, just becoming familiar with the place that I would use as a canvas for my projects that year. I took note of everything, from how other visitors walked there, to how the light fell on different areas at different times of the day, to what happened during wind or rainstorms. This familiarity, closeness to this place was a key to getting my creative process going that year.

This sculpture started and ended with the garden’s cypress trees, a species I’ve always loved. Early in my fellowship, I watched as a windstorm whipped these trees back and forth, their tops moving several feet in either direction. They were filled with a sense of animated life, simultaneously grounded and seeming about to take flight. I tried to imagine myself up at the top of one — what would be one’s experience there? I wondered how I might emphasize this movement, even in times of less wind, and the sense of tension I felt around whether the tree would remain rooted to the ground, or would lift off. I decided to figure out how to place a sculpture right at the very top of one of these slender trees, to emphasize both the tree’s vulnerability to the winds that whip through there, and its incredible resilience to these forces. The sculpture needed to match and make ‘tangible’ both this perceptible sense of vulnerability and the resilience.

I also embedded two rocks from the nearby coastline I to the tips of the sculpture to bring a faint acoustic component into the work. When the wind blows, these rocks strike each other and a slight percussive sound can be heard from down below.

Centripetal and centrifugal are opposing forces, but when form are in motion, both can exist simultaneously, and this has always interested me. Here, I explore the interactions between five forms in a group. Each individual is, on its own, out of equilibrium, yet as a group they remain upright, thanks both to their connected and opposing masses (physically) and to their suggested motions (gesturally).

I plan to adapt this idea into a large-scale outdoor piece in steel next year.

This is a work I created during my one-year fellowship at the Chateau de la Napoule in southern France, as part of being awarded the 2022-2023 Prix Henry Clews from the La Napoule Art Foundation.

I spent a lot of time in the gardens of the Château, and part of my aim was to capture and reformulate moments that I’ve seen which have defined the place for me. Sometimes to do that, I’ve had to figure out some rather unconventional places for my work…

“Murmuration” refers to a flock of birds flying in a coordinated, yet seemingly random way. I think the word is relevant to more than birds, though, as it suggests the intersection of chance and instinct, intuition and improvisation. What would be the physical form of wind, if it could be embodied? Whether this work suggests wind, birds, or something entirely different doesn’t matter to me. It is the energy, the suggested motion, and the attempt to make permanent in space something that was fundamentally ephemeral, that drove me with this piece.

This is the full, large-scale version of a smaller maquette that I made late last year (see previous post).

A catenary is the curve a cable takes under its own weight. It has one spot level to the ground; then in either direction it becomes increasingly angled. The five forms have the same parts but the angle between two of the pieces varies, allowing each to stand in balance, adapting to its particular circumstances.

After making the small maquette in wood and cable, I had what seemed at the time to be an overly-audacious goal of expanding it in scale and bringing it outdoors, where it would be vulnerable to the elements, but where perhaps the perceived ‘adaptability’ of each of the five elements would be more accentuated.

The ideas behind the piece are the same as for the maquette, but the technical challenges of making a 50-meter span that would hold five sculptures, plumb and vertical, outdoors in the fierce winds that hit that region, were significant. I learned a huge amount from this project, and it won’t be the last time that I explore this type of direction.

A catenary is the curve a cable takes under its own weight. It has one spot level to the ground, then in either direction from there it becomes increasingly angled. Here, the central form stands in balance on the middle, level platform. The other four forms have the same parts, but by varying the angle between the second and third pieces in one direction or the other, each is able to stand in balance, adapting to its particular circumstances.

This work helped me find a theme that had been present in my work for years, but always a bit obfuscated — hiding behind the form: the tension between vulnerability and resilience. Each of the five forms stands precariously balanced on a small foot; this precariousness is accentuated by the void beneath the ‘bridge’ that they stand on. And each faces its own unique angle to the ground, its own particular circumstance to which it must adapt and reach equilibrium, or tumble down.

This was my initial maquette for a later, larger, outdoor sculpture.

I created this work during my one-year fellowship at the Château de la Napoule in southern France, as part of being awarded the 2022-2023 Prix Henry Clews from the La Napoule Art Foundation.

Two forms are perched as if staring out at the sea. Each rests at the edge of equilibrium, balanced as it inclines towards the other. Each is in a state of stasis, stillness, but barely so. There is tension, they are drawn together, yet if either leaned any further toward the other it would risk a loss of stability. But would that be a collapse? Or would it be a leap into vulnerability?

These are installed near the tomb at the bottom of the ‘Tower of La Mancha’ at the Château de la Napoule in southern France. The bottom level of the tower is the tomb of Henry and Marie Clews (their sarcophagi are still visible), the couple who purchased the chateau in 1918, rebuilt it, and turned it first into a sculpture studio for Henry, and then into the La Napoule Art Foundation. Above the tomb was my studio, surrounded on three sides by the Mediterranean Sea. The third level has an empty room that is entirely inaccessible — no door or staircase reaches it. The Clews designed it during their lifetimes to be a place for their spirits to meet after their death. So right from the start of my fellowship, I knew I needed to explore this story somehow, to express it in my own sculptural vocabulary, and this is where my idea for a pair of anthropomorphic yet ’empty’ forms, staring out to the sea, not quite able to be in contact with each other — yet clearly responding to the other — came from.

This is a work I created during my one-year fellowship at the Château de la Napoule in southern France, as part of being awarded the 2022-2023 Prix Henry Clews from the La Napoule Art Foundation.