Using the simplest of materials, mostly Vermont river stones and bits of stream polished wood, plus wire, copper and brass, swamp wood, local spruce and home-grown bamboo, and paper, some cement, sometimes a little glue.... I make sculptures which I hope reflect the nature of people, and their uneven unending struggle to understand and live amongst one another.
My sculptures are neither abstract nor realistic…to me, they are simply different, an alternative that often focuses on motion stilled, pressure and resistance, solidity and transparency, obviousness and obscurity. But sometimes a sculpture is just a sculpture, a landscape, a poem, a Vermont stream, an inquisitive bust made of pebbles.
In undergraduate college, Marlboro College in southern Vermont, I majored in writing and minored in sculpture. After some years back and forth between Vermont and Colorado, I earned a graduated degree in journalism at Boston University and was a practicing journalist for a spell. Then a career in higher education administration, which persisted for decades and culminated in the presidency of Sterling College (2006-2012). Towards the end of that job, I became interested in making sculpture kits of stone assemblages, fitting the selected pieces into used cigar boxes, and including a short poem on what to do with it all when deboxed. Then I went on toward the sculptures I make today.
After Sterling, while expanding my repertoire of sticks and stones to include bark and gold and silver, twisted sheaves of bamboo, rice paper and even dust, I was working at a New México University in an interim, 16-month position. There I completed a memoir, “Good Fortune Next Time: Life, Death, Irony and the Administration of Very Small Colleges” (Mandel Vilar Press/Dryad Press 2017).
Only then, finally, I turned my woodshop into a stone shop. And so after 30 years in higher education I could at last devote myself to the important and enjoyable stuff, making art and writing, and fishing for trout.