In my art I explore the discomforts and absurdities as well as the sublime beauty and fragility in this, our human condition. I'm especially interested in the periodic transformations we must make as humans in order to survive spiritually. The cocoon states, during which we are most vulnerable, I view as sacred - and the process of metamorphosis must not be rushed. The life's work of an artist may be one concrete example of this process, but no one escapes the need for periodic restructuring, realignment, or even re-invention of the self.

Ideally, I'd like the viewer to have an immediate visceral response to my work, even if it's not immediately understood. I like to work with either human forms or with simple objects and shapes that make us remember or wonder at what is precious to us and what is threatening.

Some years ago I met an older artist, Endel Koks, also in exile from Estonia. His lifestyle was to wander around the globe, spending at least six months of the year in a foreign country. On his fiftieth birthday he woke up in Jerusalem with startling insight into how he should live his life: with courage, freedom and joy!

It sounded so simple. He has since died, but I often think back on him and wonder what his personal impediments had been to courage, freedom and joy. I'm certainly exploring my own. Perhaps the simple task of living is more difficult for those with fragmented cultures and troubled pasts (now a large portion of Canadians), but it seems that in current economic times most people are faced with the fundamental questions of what it is to live well, and how to choose well. As our romance with materialism and consumerism fades, we have to move beyond our concepts of progress and success as tied in with the accumulation of things. I think it's fair to say that many of us are faced with the need for re-inventing ourselves, as well as the society around us. Courage, freedom and joy should be desirable goals, not to be confused with status and material possessions.

Sculpture is proving to be a fruitful venue for me, allowing me to explore my philosophical interests (humanism and existentialism) in combination with other passions such as dance and the human body.

I've included three quotations, the first of which expresses similar feelings to mine that art should be informed by humanism (and I try for this in my own). The second and third express concerns that I too have for the status of art, and what the artist in North America is up against today.

With reference to the mind of a Renaissance Humanist:

"...its suspicion of moral progress and its skepticism about ever-renewed solutions to timeless, unsolvable human problems. The humanist, I said, assumes that the individual human consciousness is a construction of humanity's own imaginative making, and that thus the power to think in signs and symbols is the quintessential human attribute. The humanist regards himself best employed in acts of evaluation, and insists on the close alliance of ethics and expression."

"...America has evolved a media apparatus of such proportion that it has come to obfuscate the truth and mediate every experience we have in the public sphere, and often in the private as well, transforming politics, painful personal testimony, tragedy and world events into entertainment."

"Others often seem drawn to a society which appears to have shed the weight of the past and tradition and which also denies the reality of growing up and older, and then unselfconsciously wraps itself in the image of righteousness and the good. But it is also this denial of what is that has marginalized serious art-making in the United States..."

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Last updated Apr 28/97

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