Looking through the chain link fence.
As a child, my family had a summer house in Bolton Landing, New York, near Lake George. My aunts would take a herd of kids, my cousins, siblings, friends, out walking in the nearby hills. One day we walked past the studio and grounds of the sculptor David Smith. Smith kept dozens of his pieces on display in his compound, and I remember looking through the chain link fence in amazement at those crazy constructions of welded steel.
Almost by accident.
I came to welding, and to sculpture and to art in my early 30's (or, perhaps, it came to me), almost by accident. Repair welding was a part of everyday life at the sawmill that my brother and I were operating. I stepped forward as the welder when we needed one. Surrounded by the fabulous steel shapes of the sawmill, and having the equipment to work with them, I started to use them in a different direction, sculpture.
No limits.
Twenty years later, I'm still experimenting. I have used found objects, simply welded together, and I have done elaborate fabrications. Forge work has no limits in what the smith can do with steel. I have combined forgings with fabrication with found objects. I have done several series of sculptures, some of which I continue to work and elaborate on.
Doors, windows, passages, portals.
Doors and windows, "portals," passages, walls for that matter. ..why are they so, as one curator put it to me, "captivating?"
We use them every day; they regulate, even define our lives, our movements, our interactions with the world, with each other. Yet they remain largely taken for granted.
I think that my fascination, my "captivation" began with Richard Serra's Tilted Arc that was installed in lower Manhattan. While I never saw the actual piece, the publicity around in was unavoidable.
This "thing" that cut across a square, forcing people around it instead of through it on their normal routes to and from, was a barrier, a force that created this side and that. It separated a once easy route, across the square, from the "normal" lives of the peoples' routines.
Sculptural reality.
Perhaps most importantly, sculpture has given me the impulse to delve into the lives and work of so many artists in the search for my own sculptural reality. Sculpture has also opened the doors into other art forms, showing me that painting, carving, dance, performance, voice, instruments, all basically come from (or, perhaps, come into) the same place.