All my work investigates how perception creates reality. I make sculptures, installations, and walk-through experiential environments that are informed by the look of the natural world at all scales, and ways of seeing, from microscopy to astronomy. I also perform formalized personal interactions, most recently as fortune telling, in the tone of delight and curiosity, for the purpose of exploring and sharing the creative power of perception.

My current woven wire sculptures and installations employ lenses, light, and shadow in creation of walk-through compositions that play with depth perception, visual discernment, and what appears “real.” Participants pass through responsive light and surprising moving shadows, optical illusions, and visual ambiguities that can only be experienced in person, transforming the illuminated sculpture from something the viewer is looking at, to something the viewer is absorbed in. With a cloud-gazing type of interactive speculation, people wave their hands in the light to test shadows, circle curiously examining the LED’s, and photograph the work and themselves in it. Woven wire knotted in Buckminster Fuller’s tensile triangle design forms the physical body of the works that exist parcel to and in conversation with the architecture of the site, often requiring the viewer to step in, around, and under in a near dance of curiosity.

I use LED and digital technologies to alter qualities of the light itself, in pursuit of color, luminosity, movement and viewing angles. Working with technicians at Cree and an architectural lighting designer to develop LED circuits that I can solder according to my needs in my studio has allowed me to sculpt with light using focus, reflection, and shadow. The work can include programmed digital technology for responsive light.

After 1986-1991 working at Lill Street  Clay Studios in Chicago, and my B.A. in Philosophy from DePaul, I engineered an 18-month apprenticeship in figurative sculpture in St. Petersburg, Russia. Afterward, 1993-2006 I ran my production line of handmade ceramics at wholesale and retail art and craft fairs, including American Craft Council, and SOFA shows. I travelled the country pulling my artwork and craft tent in a trailer behind my truck. I also shipped artwork to 140 craft galleries all over the country. My 2007 residency at the Archie Bray Foundation gave rise to a transition in my work. I began my graduate study at SAIC in 2009 to radically reconfigure how I make, and to explore inquiries about perception that I initially encountered in my B.A.

I tell fortunes out of a 30-year practice, and family history of ESP that includes cousin, noted psychic Edgar Cayce, and a grandfather in Kentucky who walked tables and bent spoons with his mind. The untold, the as-yet, flows through me using a crystal ball in ecstatic narrative. I aim to create joy and curiosity about perception, a ripple in the picture of what we call ‘reality,’ a freer place for the mind, where wondering replaces knowing. From wonder comes the power to create.