2009 ONLINE CATALOG

20th Century         Contemporary 

BACON                 CHAPMAN BROS

BRAQUE               PETER DOIG

CHAGALL              DAMIEN HIRST     

DUBUFFET            GARY HUME

MATISSE              ANISH KAPOOR

MIRO                   GRAYSON PERRY

PICASSO              MARC QUINN

                          GAVIN TURK

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Observing nature, reveling in its beauty, inspires contemplations and creative expressions.  Most poignantly, however, nature makes us face its continual lessons.  Poetic writing about nature, from Emerson and Thoreau to Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard, suggests that most of what we need to know about each other and ourselves lives in the natural world and, while nothing lasts forever, everything exists in a context of the ongoing.  I want my work to assert this simple message in human environments — in places and moments when it's far too easy to forget that being in the midst of nature can be most valuable to us.
 
The natural world that most of us know today cannot be perceived in some pure form; we are too urbanized.  Part of what it means to be modern is realizing that the natural landscape shares the world with the human-made landscapes that dominate our days.  Over time, I've come to realize that this reality makes nature more beautiful and more philosophically valuable to us.  In it we find everything that matters most: the fleeting and the permanent, the lifecycle, the insistent effects of both storm and calm.  We begin to look for ways to make our lives richer, to reflect the value we place on the natural landscape, and to see in it metaphors that help us better understand ourselves and each other.  Our search grows out of nostalgia, yet it is timely, current.  There is a strong Surrealist connection here as nature illuminates our experience, enabling us to tap into our subconscious and develop our self-awareness and human potential.  Like the values instilled by the Surrealists, my work displaces familiar things, such as a leaf or a root, to forge new meanings.
 
From the beginning, my design work has been rooted in understanding how people actually live and interact in the natural and urban worlds.  I've always been most excited by getting to know how people use their spaces and by designing for both social interaction and quieter, more solitary moments within a living space.  Living itself is so artful that, although I wanted to push myself and my ideas to make sculptures, I never wanted to make work that would exist apart from human life and experience.  I wanted to make artwork with a point of view, to truly address what it means to live and change and grow as an individual, as well as works that directly involve themselves in people's lives.
 
My love of design is largely a love of combinations — wonderful, idiosyncratic, whimsical juxtapositions.  I like to put the old alongside the new.  I see all of the works in Pieces of Ourselves as useful, not only for their basic functionality, but also for the reminders they offer about the natural course of a human life, which moves from innocence to wisdom, through new growth and ultimately into maturity.