The material

In general in my work, i am often presented with a material and objects are created from that material. I believe this body of work is separate from previous works, in the sense that the idea to work with sail canvas came to me, without any specific pieces In mind. While the transformation has been relatively smooth to go from steel and wood to a softer material, the transition was not without its hiccups. the initial idea was to have more of a patch worked feel to it where seeming imprecision yielded a formulated shape or form. after several experiments with this I came to the conclusion that this just doesn't happen. this was when i started to turn towards computer aided design to create the shapes.

The use of sails specifically came quite naturally to me, Being from around this area, and having a father who was a marina worker, the use of nautical equipment seemed appropriate. I have always tried to maintain a transparency and truth in my materials, both in a geographical sense and functionality. In the sense that most of my material has a local relationship and simplicity in its function.

Sail fabric, being both familiar and readily available in the area, presented itself as a solution long before i had any particular body of work in mind that related to it. In the beginning the idea of using the fabric for what it was and using wind and currents to activate kinetic sculptures seemed like the right direction to head, but nothing came to mind that didn't seem so obvious.

The Idea to inflate came about during sketches, I suppose partly due to a play on words evolving into a sort of kitchy relationship between sails and air. I have done the most on my part to avoid exploiting this sort of literal/figurative problem, but it makes me happy to know that it is still there.