I have often sought a through line in my work, a sense that what I am making has some common denominator. For a time I relied on the use of a material or method, but that got complicated quickly by my love of ceramics, and printmaking, and drawing, and painting, etc. I prefer not to be hemmed in by the desire for fitting myself into a category, a discipline, in spite of having worked with ceramics much of my life. So I began to look for a visual or formal language that held together across all these media. Drawing and a graphic line seems to run most coherently through my work, and yet even that falters as I find my line or my approach to materials, or my embrace of theatricality can lean hard into an expressiveness that doesn't fit neatly into a formalism that seems so popular of late. In all this incessant seeking to conform to a core identity through form making, I was reminded of the desire for freedom that art making has always been about; breaking out of the conformity of a culture that I have often felt constrained by, making a mark. And in that simple seeking of a place for free expression of form and materials and ideas, I find joy and laughter, and surprise. The core of what I make are not simply images and objects, it’s like an energy, like the artifacts of an event, a memory, a moment.

This sequence of images below began with 1,000 drawings culled from 30 years of sketch books, transformed into 41 prints, with gestural drawings of Jamón Ibérico (Spanish smoked ham legs), superimposed in four colors, abstracted and broken down into half-tone dot patterns. These prints were then cut up into 1,000 small swatches, and were papered over sculptural plinths on which various ceramic abstractions of ham and pork products were placed. Then these prints were silk-screened onto thin paper and pasted over ceramic busts, and lately these have been printed directly onto porcelain forms. An idea unfolds visually and intuitively, and I try to keep up with it, chasing it where it wants to go.

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