This is a series of work entitled “Evolution Series”.   When I began these works in high fire Fire Clay and Stoneware in the late nineties and early 2000 I understood something powerful was occurring but I was not clear where this energy was coming from, what these sculptures were about, only that I had to make them, and with an urgency that I could neither stop or hold back.  I made close to 40 large-ish sculptures in a period of about two to three years.

In hindsight there is now no question as to what they are about and why they came to be but in the midst of this tidal wave of creative energy, I was mystified.  I feverishly rode the wave as each one presented itself.  

They are about the body, my body, my broken heart and my efforts to desperately grasp and understand the grief that had been pushed so deep down for three decades and had made an uncomfortable home within me.  I was 13 when my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer, then brain cancer and16 when she died.  The word Cancer was never uttered in our home.  I was ill equipped for this tremendous loss.

My emotional protective mechanism hurled me into a constant motion of activities and in the process, and over the next thirty years I lost the ability to retrieve memories of my mother.  

The cumulative expulsion of this buried grief served as a huge release transforming pain into something creative and tangible in clay.  These works are a few of the sculptures from my “Evolution Series”.