Winter clutches our world like no other season. It strips warmth and vegetation, leaving a starkly simplified landscape. In it’s icy grasp a frigid beauty emerges with a medley of smooth and jagged textures. Winter’s Edge is a series of sculptural and functional objects crafted with this diverse beauty in mind.
I’ve always been drawn to the shoreline. Beach, brook, island or canyon, I don’t think I’m alone with my curiosities about the seam between liquid and solid. Water is amazing in itself, a never ending physical expression of kinetic energy in any state. Juxtaposed with the forces and textures of stone, sand and debris and you have a vivid contrast between the instance of a water drop and the eons of it’s effect. This work is a testament to these elemental forces.
How we influence the landscapes we inhabit is not subtle but severe. Savage, intense development spreads an interconnected urban industrial landscape while fracturing natural orders. This is justified as a measure of progress; establishing identity and lifestyle or achieving “success”. Artifacts of industry achieve iconic familiarity across these horizons, tributes to aggressive resource consumption.
I get a real kick from driving an open road in a stark landscape. From strange terrain. Walking in spaces people don't normally walk in. Finding something somebody decided to forget about. From seeing what is there. Maybe it's because I've spent some time driving in places like this. Maybe I seek these places out because I think I'll like them. It's profoundly exciting exploring a new place, and somehow that turns to poignancy when I look back at having been there.
A strange landscape is filled with artifacts and markers the familiar eye ignores. Mundane and intrigue co-mingle in variant lamp posts, warning signs and impersonal objects.. The very character of the landscape is inferred to these forms, as their meaning to the traveling eye becomes symbolically greater than their function.
Industrial forms encrusted with life reflect the marine environment they developed in. Objects allude to a history, a lost function, and a chaotic aquatic environment teeming with life. Gritty patina textures seem grown from the shores these objects were discovered on.