I have worked with found- object materials for the past decade: truck and automobile tires, exploded light bulbs, 19th century oak barrel staves and tree fragments, debris of all types, old hardware fasteners, egg crates, etched glass and so forth.
In particular, I have been exhibiting exploded-tire works. I think of it this way, to take an example from nature. A tree’s shape is a visual record of its life-long dialogue–by turns intense, pleasant, balanced, deprived, sporadic, even short–with the elements of water, sun and earth, as well as many other factors such as the laws of physics and chaos that apply to the blown-apart tires; the differing stresses on rubber and steel; the difference in rubbers employed in the tires themselves; the nature of the impact that caused the blow-out to occur. Furthermore, once scattered on the road, a fragment is repleatedly explosed to weather extremes which can relax the natural rounded curve of the tire. And the forces of being run over by cars and trucks alter the shape, as does the occasional gathering together of fragments into a mass, which in turn is subjected to the above processes. In its discovered state, I can see the fragment–like the tree–has assumed the shape of its biography.
That’s where I come in. I alter these materials, manipulating them and combining them into the works I make in the studio. Sometimes these result in bas-relief pieces, as well as pedestal-, hanging- and floor-sculptures.
In my studio, I apply traditional sculptural principals of positive and negative space, the composition they stimulate, as well as expressions of contrast, balance, rhythm, and so forth, to an unconventional art material.
The very most recent work employs not tire materials, but de-glazed light bulbs, shaped paint tubes, bronze and oak fragments, tiny mirrors, unusual fasteners, steel grids, and etched glass. So far.