For several years I was an avid birder in grade school.  I woke up early Saturday mornings and snuck out of the house before anyone else was awake. With a pair of binoculars hanging around my neck, I wandered the suburban yards, local woods and fallow fields, looking and listening for birds.  Crows and robins were common; prize sightings were the fiery Northern cardinal and the brilliant American goldfinch. Those solo meanderings, with peak moments of acute sensory concentration, brought me reverie and peace.  And they planted the seeds for my practice as an artist: alone in the studio, wandering amongst the fields of ideas, searching through materials and processes that coalesce in fleeting moments of beauty.

The plaster white forms in these images are models for tombs, shaped like crude, ancient burial mounds, with horn-like antennae that stretch to connect to the ineffable: not some kind of afterlife, or realm of the so-called spirit, but, rather, the place deep in our psyche where language and image find their faculty to make meaning out of an inchoate world.  The wooden structure in the images--sometimes pictured in full, sometimes drawn in outline form--is an imaginary birdhouse, not the kind that would work for birds in the real world, but an imaginary home for birds that speak poetry and fly upside down.   All together, these images inquire into a persistent mourning for a lost eden, trapped in the eternal return of an imaginary childhood: a pure beginning, before the great trauma, always informing the present with the symptoms, fantasies, and nightmares of the trauma’s eternal return.