It is said that Jesus’ form of ministry was meeting people where they are. As they are, not as they could be, but in their everyday life, whether a rich tax collector or a poor widow, whether in a state of panic or grief or contemplation or hilarity. Just there, and then he left it open-ended. I attempt to honor my own such encounters and embed them into the making of ambiguous things. Encounters always beget stories, so a narrative is usually involved with my things. Urban T. Holmes, III says “Things are important. They are the pegs upon which we hang the stories of our lives.” Visual art is not usually accompanied by much text, but I am seeking a symbiotic, open ended, and sacramental relationship between object and story.

Although I play with painting and mosaic, most of my things are hand-built of porcelain clay, glazed with chalky underglazes and metallics and fired several times. Like all ceramics, porcelain is subjected to transformation by fire, but this persnickety clay is prone to more technical flaws. Thus, my attempts at trompe l’oeil are always thwarted, thankfully, offering surprises that affect the story.

My work is drawn out of my own milieu which gives it a particularity that is sometimes innocuous, sometimes exotic; that is, as exotic as a honky baby boomer raised in Arkansas and Texas can be. It just is what it is, a toenail in the body of Christ, mysteriously connected to all the other parts.

One of art’s benefits is to companion us through our particular place in time—this age of “therapeutic, technological, consumerist militarism” (to quote Walter Brueggemann). As a faithful doubter, I need art’s clarifying lens and its focus on newness.  I am alert to art’s two-fold prophetic role: to critique our society and to energize us toward hope. Art enfleshes this ache for new life as it examines the wild ambiguities of our mundane, tragic and utterly delightful world. When where we are is hallowed, the familiar is defamiliarized and we can sense common ground. The lofty goal of my art is to help us detach from that which shames us, and with humor prod  our  entry into transcendence, even transformation. I have a strong hunch that such transformation is in direct proportion to the inclusiveness of our love.