Patternmaker's forms

My Swedish immigrant grandfather was a patternmaker in Chicago who precisely carved objects out of wood to be cast. I continue to work within this lineage by recasting constructed central objects out of the found photographed surfaces of wood, glass, steel and stone. In this “rebuilt” series the skin of these shapes transforms and repurposed them into archetypal forms: e.g. a house, a pulpit, a stove, a water basin. We bring to them our own inventory of objects, embedded with memory and mystery. My photographic images are connected to a long lineage of land & cityscape work informed by my background in painting and filmmaking. With classical Chinese painting’s aesthetics that balance the polarities of near and far and empty and full as essential to a vision of the world, and with the language of film where multiple images are montaged together to form a narrative. The gathering of photographic images in order to understand a place is about repeatedly going out and re-seeing it. From the visual diary of these wanderings comes the studio practice of assembling and re-setting the parts much like how a Japanese garden is constructed, balancing its elements poised between the natural and and the composed.