When I go into the studio I go there to team up with clay in giving shape to something that has no other or better means of expression. Because clay is so malleable and imposes so little on the outcome of our collaboration and because my mission is, at heart, a search for the basic truth of the material, much of my work is uncomplicated. The work may become narrative to the extent that events of the day accompany me to the studio but I try to use that influence as a partner in finding a path to sculptural success rather than as a cue to produce works about “current events.” The more complicated or ornate a piece becomes the less likely it is to communicate something fundamental and true about the medium and the interaction I have had with it. As a rule, simplicity, or at least the perception of uncomplicatedness, is a sign that I have had some degree of success with a piece.

 

While at UC Davis between 1968 and 1972 I spent as much time as possible working among such ceramic sculptors as Bob Arneson, Marilyn Levine, David Gilhooly, Richard Notkin, Donna Billick and others. The venue was temporary building nine (TB-9) on the UC Davis campus. The environment within TB-9 was convivial and supportive and lots of great sculpture was done every day without ceremony. But the world outside was a different and worrisome place. The war in Vietnam, the draft and Watergate among other events cast a pall over hopes and expectations for the future. As a result much of the work from that time conveyed a mixed sense of grim nihilism and absurdist denial—wonderfully undergirded by a resolute sense of humor. Not surprisingly my work today comes largely from a similarly bleak but insistently “happy” synthesis of dark, but often laughable and absurd, takes on the world.

 

 

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