What ties my work together is that all of the pieces result from my exploration of a particular material or a particular machine. The earliest work, the concrete pieces, started from my idea of using a particular material/process, i.e.,“ferrocemento,” that had been invented by the Italian engineer Pier Luigi Nervi for certain buildings – during World War II he even built boats out of it. The process is based upon using a maximum of steel in concrete rather than a minimum as in normal reinforced concrete. It occurred to me that it would be possible to model a sculpture in expanded metal lath, a common building material, built up of several layers, and then force cement mortar into its interstices. At the time, 1959, I had recently returned from a fellowship in Europe and was armed with a supply of Italian plaster carving tools.
The next group of works, the painted wooden wall pieces, were the product of a wood router and an interest in exploring painted three-dimensional forms. Some of this work is flat with projections. (The painted trash-can cover is part of this output.) I then wondered what would happen to the forms if I used the router to create interlocking forms, somewhat like a child’s puzzle, but further complicated by my interest in knowing what would happen if the pieces used were open-ended, i.e., not resolved in themselves, so that they might be added to later.
Ceramics by its very nature is governed by the process by which each individual piece is made. Some of the work was prompted by working with a mandrel – modeling the clay over the mandrel (often a rounded cylindrical form) and then using many of these to make up the whole piece. Others were the product of a particular method that used a copper wash over a white stoneware (a method I got from another ceramist) to result in a white travertine-like appearance.
The figurative metal pieces resulted from the notion that I could make sculptures using the metal-lath reinforcing medium I had used earlier independently of the concrete.
The pieces made by the repetitive use of standard lengths of painted wood were an exercise in the making of a sculpture with no glue or fasteners other than the wood itself (in this case small dowels). I further discovered the formal possibilities of working in an open-ended way without any particular predetermined form in mind to discover what resulted.
Then I moved to the curved wood pieces. These came about after I had replaced an old radial-arm saw (inherited from my father) with a fancy Japanese compound miter saw. With this I could cut extremely accurate angles, so I decided to explore what would happen when I put these angles together & glued them. Since the first pieces I made were extremely fragile, I acquired a biscuit jointer which permits reinforcing of the joint.
And finally the computer-aided router pieces. Ever since I started to work in sculpture fifty years ago, I had the notion that it must be possible to make an entire sculpture by machine. Some years ago, when my son Chuck was doing the curtain wall for the Salt Lake City Olympics, I went with him to the shop which was fabricating the curtain and saw a very large version of the machine I now use. At that time it occurred to me that it might be possible to use three-dimensional scans as the basis of work cut on a CNC router. The rest is history. I acquired my own CNC router as well as a scanner and supply of software programs that I am still learning to use.