old man burden

Part of a larger piece that I intend to show in the Phoenix Open weekend. Lots of little figures carrying things.

Landscape Pillar reworked

In retrospect the piece needed a a bit more time to develop.

Through a glass darkly.

"Nothing is small and nothing is large. We carry worlds inside us. The small is part of the large and the large of the small. A drop of blood is an entire world with its own sun and planets. The sea is but a drop of water from a tiny part of the body."

Edvard Munch.

Fragments of glass that turn into sand and then fuse back together into glass. Energy joins.

landscape walking

I am in the process of making a large scale version of this one that I will be taking back into the landscape and walking with it.

Landscape pillar

In the British landscape tradition....maybe.

"I think that could go back to the time when people had to live in small groups of relatives-maybe 50 or 100 people at the most. And evolution or God or whatever arranged things genetically, to keep the little families going, to cheer them up, so that they could all have somebody to tell stories around the campfire at night and somebody else to paint pictures on the walls of the caves, and somebody else who wasn't afraid of anything and so on.

That's what I think. And of course a scheme like that doesn't make sense anymore, because simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a 1000 years ago has to give up, has to go into some other kind of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.

The entire planet can get along nicely now with maybe a dozen champion performers in each of human giftedness. A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We call him or her an "exhibitionist".

How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, 'Wow! Were you ever drunk last night!' ".

Kurt Vonnegut - Bluebeard.

Cosmic cup sculpture

I suppose this is about as literal as I am going to get. Molecules, atoms, particles, all there. Apparently particles pass through us all the time and carry on to wherever they are going to end up. It kind of changes the way that you look at anything really.

Little Boy Blue (riot)

This is one that might be translated into a carrying piece. Maybe walk through Clapham, where the pictures were taken, carrying the sculpture.

"The great fires were now lit on the other side of the ocean. It is not for nothing that Brazil owes its name to the French word for charcoal. Our spread over the earth was fuelled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn. From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose light reverberated around 18th century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion. Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artifact we create. The making of a fish hook, manufacture of a china cup, or production of a television programme, all depend on the same process of combustion. Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers. From the earliest times, human civilisation has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away."
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn.