ARTIST STATEMENT

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance,
is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
– Elaine Scarry

Beautiful things have always affected my life and I believe beauty is a powerful force in the world.  Not all beauty is dramatic and I am often drawn towards the quiet and the subtle: the texture of a rusty nail, a discarded book, pieces of a magnolia seed, or the curve of a beach stone.  Each new object or material that catches my eye has the potential to shift the balance of my work.  I love the dance that results because of this, and I hope that what I create may someday slip into someone else’s life and tip the balance of their world a little further in the direction of beauty.

I hope my art can, as Julian Stair says, “reflect the nature of our experiential lives and become a poetry of the actual.”  As a metalsmith I am grounded in the long tradition of craft and feel at home with that tradition’s tie to the objects of everyday life.  My love of good craftsmanship reflects my belief that we should be creating a culture which values people over machines, and quality over quantity in material goods.