“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” James Baldwin
My art is inherently political and narrative, using the data of the past to comment on the present. I create miniatures – roomboxes and dollhouses - contained spaces. Dollhouses, a form usually taken up by women and girls assembling images of imagined lives, become the home of “alternative” narratives. Sculpted from unglazed ceramic, my miniature figures reveal largely unknown histories hidden within the depths of archives. They are inspired by historical events, even more so by the people that history has forgotten, the “footnotes” of history. History is often presented as the stories of heroes and heroic action. Yet who reveres or even remembers the first woman sent to the electric chair, a sad husband cuckolded by a Civil War general, the hapless soldier mutilated in battle, the fading strength of the failed polar explorer still proud to die for the glory of Britain—all fading into history, barely remembered, as we will be one day be, all “footnotes.” Through creating sculptures, I hope, however briefly, to bring the stories of these lost figures to life, to have them step out of the photographs, lithographs and letters that comprise their only record and reemerge in three dimensions.
Like the lives they depict, my ceramic figures are small, referencing the Staffordshire ceramics that celebrated the heroes of the Victorian era. Created from unglazed ceramic, the figures are fragile, uncomfortable in their skin; their survival is tenuous. Their lack of color reminds us that they are fading into the ashen white of obscurity, presence becoming absence, experience becoming memory. They are also the exact size of the action figures I played with as a child, creating stories and imagining who I would become. Lying on the floor, manipulating the figures, I could enter their world, and they became the characters of my fantasies. Like their childhood counterparts, the sculptures, my “inaction figures” have entered the domain of dreams, a place far distant from their origins.
All history is construction; a story created to explain a given set of facts. My sculptures are no different—they are personal interpretations, as much about myself as the overt events depicted. I am able to find the narrative of myself and my family in the lives of others, crafting my tales through them. Desire, ambition and human cruelty form the core of my work. While the subjects are often tragedies or pointless atrocities, they also contain the humor inherent in human frailty. The hand-sculpted figures offer stories of masculinity (albeit often toxic), of great men and their downfall, of the wars between men, between men and women, freaks and outsiders, the agony of the immigrant and the loneliness of the explorer.
My work exists at the apex of a triangle whose base is cultural history, filtered through the lens of memory and submitted to the subjectivity of the perceiver. The viewer becomes a voyeur as the small sizes of the pieces force an intimate entry into an interior world. My pieces express “true stories” gained through my painstaking research in archives, personal accounts, and historical narratives. I offer stories of hubris, folly, love, class, glorious courage and pitiable weakness. History is uncovered and then used as a tool for future discoveries. I imagine my work as falling somewhere between the dialectic poles of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Dinos and Jake Chapman.