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Sculptures from the "Rubber Bullets" series further my interest in exploring the nature of various materials, their unique properties and inherent meanings in sculpture-making. Cast in solid, clear and flexible platinum-silicone rubber, the true nature of the material and the animated vibrancy of these sculptures are discovered through the viewer’s interactive physical contact with the work. When pushed with the most minor effort, the sculptures begin to swing and sway. The experience is augmented by RGB/LED lights in the base, which point upwards, and slowly shift through the entire light spectrum, thus illuminating the sculptures and the surrounding room with perpetually changing color. In this atmosphere, the viewer is provided a vertiginous, yet bizarrely serene and hypnotic experience of a material rarely if ever encountered in such large mass, light and form.
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The shape of the "Rubber Bullets" sculptures is the logical and natural selection of a form based on the inherent properties of a specific material, in this case rubber. It is a catenary solid, derived from a natural mathematical curve that can be generated by dangling a piece of string from any two points. Given the inherent flexibility of this material, and my desire to create a larger than life, freestanding flexible sculpture, the shape was chosen primarily for reasons of its geometry. It provides the greatest overall height around a concentric center of gravity, lessening in mass as it increases it height, using the least volume of material.
By their shape, the works and are meant to comment on love, war and sex, and are personal in their nature and relationship to us and our bodies.
They are at once missile-like and futuristic, and overtly phallic, or like sex toys for giants from another planet. In an extension of that dichotomy, the smaller scaled "Butterflies and Bullets" series contain real butterflies from all over the world, a symbol of love.
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Other recent work includes the bronze and clear urethane versions
of "Blowout". These pieces show the transformation of garbage to gold.
They were cast in a mold created from a Bridgestone tire that had been used on earth moving equipment. Instead of air, this tire had been
injected with an oily, half congealed black neoprene rubber that never degrades, and finally must be disposed of in abandoned coal shafts.
The original tire was one of the most raw and nasty objects that I had ever seen or dealt with. Yet its' obvious muscularity as an object
was counterbalanced by its' gooey interior and in this way, over time, became for me a metaphor for us all.
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