Why this site, why now?
About the site
About this new work
About the artist – written
About the artist – visual
Site Organization
About the Artist – Written
I’m like an otter who’s been kept in a cage on dry land — diving and diving in water just to feel that it’s there. I had an illness that stole my creativity and now I’ve got it back.
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I had known since late childhood that people spoke words but they also spoke between the lines and that’s what you had to attend to. Tone of voice, fiddle with a necklace, frown. Words were important but no mystery to me. Humans have language. So do sparrows, but our grammar is complex, we know a poem from a novel, we have enough vocabulary to fill dictionaries. Highly unlikely sparrows do.
In college I read Suzanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key. She talked directly to my innards and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I wasn’t a freak. I switched my major from anthropology to symbolism — and have never had regrets.
Symbolism (art, literature, symbolic logic, transformational grammar, archaeology,…). This current work flows from that. Maybe more like a natural stream that twists around tree roots than like a clean chute from yonder to here. I see as I work with different types of image that each has a compelling effect on how I use them.
Symbolism means for me how one communicates with all the unspoken but deeply familiar cues that everyone belonging in a culture recognizes. A cow knows when a newcomer shows up. Smell? posture? funny moo?
Humans, being more complex than cows, make use of a subtler ability to read messages. A slapdash sprawling black line tells you something different than a cramped tidy one. The fact that you feel this difference — well, it proves you can feel it. That sensitivity is built into you.
Without your receptivity, no Madison Avenue.
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When I graduated college other students were applying for masters programs. Aspiring to write theories about symbolism seemed bogus. So I set out to master how to manipulate symbolic content wordlessly.
It was a fey, hippie-headed decision and I had no idea how to go forward. But here I am and I’m satisfied that the goal is met.