REFLECTION
Painted bronze, wood and paper, 2007, 5" x 5" x 5".
After our youngest son left for college, I brought my sculptures home from galleries and out of storage. I was filling a void. I was preparing to “art” again. I needed to remember where I had been and where I was headed before setting art aside to sculpt boys and communities.
I always knew sculpture is my thinking place. I saw individual pieces as snapshots of isolated moments, or sometimes as bookends to a continuum of a thought. Yet in the stillness of the mornings, my eyes tracing their contours as I drank coffee, I began to realize that together the sculptures told a story, my story, our story.
I scoured my workroom for the words scribbled on scratch paper that accumulate when I sculpt. I reread my graduate thesis. I sifted through slides for a record of the false starts and forgotten versions. Finally, I began to put the words and the pictures together. I rearranged them. I wrote more words, finding words for long-avoided pieces, uncovering words from which pieces had yet to grow.
Slowly words stitched the images together. As the gaps and loose ends became glaringly apparent, I knew where to begin. Unfinished pieces were resolved, new pieces evolved, and the parables of my life coalesced into sculpture and words.