website and update

working on my website earlier this week has provided an opportunity to revisit past work and consider it in relationship with my current work. my history of art-making can look inconsistent and disparate at times, but there are recurrent themes. for example, lines pop up in ways that reflect an interest in pattern, borders, gesture, branches, and striations in natural and painted forms. one small body of work from 1997 is a series of small drawings made up entirely of more or less straight lines moving from left to right across paper with horizontal orientation. my site-specific sculpture, mudquilt (above), from Land Arts in 2002, was a "quilt" of pleated mud balls formed by scraping the semi-solid surface of a dry riverbed with my fingertips. here again, there are lines. a much utilized technique in my painting is to pull a brush through thick, unmixed acrylic color, causing the paint to form linear striations of color, resembling the layers of sediment which hardens into rock.
there are also other recurrent themes, or interests, processes, inspirations: working with semi-viscous material, physicality of process and material, and attraction to the unpleasant (the gross, dangerous, and controversial), just to name a few.