The Terracotta Warriors:

  Eight views of five ceramic sculptures from my senior exhibition at Wheaton College, completed between February and April 2002. All sculptures use red terracotta clay, fired to cone 06 and are polychromed with spray enamel, tempra, and wax finishing. When I sculpt, I probe the pre-formed mass for suggestions of hips, arms, legs, breasts, or other body parts, using that information to build the piece. In this way my sculptures are informed by an intuitive process. Intuitive process is more than a two-way communication between art and artist. It is an act of faith, one in which the artist must trust the material, believe that the process is meaningful, and be convinced that it produces important and relevant contemporary work. After completing most of the scultpures, each piece began to take on properties of an element of nature. I used that piece of information to unify the work, making the sculptures spiritual representations of the natural world. These sculptures use texture and polychrome to represent Fire, Water, Terrain and Air, while the human figure, with gesture and pose, is used to personify these elements. Though not living things in the scientific sense, for mankind these forces are very much alive with personality. Water is gentile but strong, as in a stream or a hurricane. Terrain is hard and direct, e.g. earthquakes and avalanches. Air can be uplifting and optimistic, as when flying a kite, while Fire is healing and but dangerous, keeping humans alive and decimating entire forests. Even in language we constantly personify natural disasters. For example, in Egypt in 1993 when an earthquake struck, people said that the earth was dancing. My sculptures illustrate how people bring nature to life by giving it human characteristics and culpabilities.

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