Ninety percent of making art is observation. You cannot empathize with what you don’t understand. You cannot understand what you cannot see. Attention is the mechanism of empathy, and empathy — for material, for subject, for the people who encounter the work — is the mechanism of everything else.
This is where the work begins. Not with an idea imposed on a material, but with looking closely enough at the material to understand what it is, what it does, and what else it could be. Art is sensual. If you learn how a material wants to be touched, it will open to you and consent to be shaped. Force your will and it will snap. Seeing is understanding. Vision is finding the consensus between concept and material characteristics. I’ve spent thirty years listening to materials tell me what they are, then asking them to be something else — not by force, but by finding the movement they were always capable of that no one had asked for yet. The material collaborates when you respect its nature.
The simplicity and purity of expression in a line drawn by Picasso and a long note bent by Jimi Hendrix are functionally identical. To draw a line that cleanly requires moving the hand quickly, confidently. A line drawn slowly, carefully, will inevitably wobble. It’s counter-intuitive.
To make a line like that in steel is the opposite— you must bend the steel cold because heating it to speed the process will kink the metal. You want an angle, heat it, you want a curve bend it cold. Bending cold is more work, but the steel keeps its nature while taking the form I see. Cutting a line in steel moves at the speed of the torch— too fast, it doesn’t cut through, too slow, you are left with big globs of molten metal behind the cut to be removed. When I cut stone impossibly thin, my whole body — not just my hands — absorbs the tension between hardness and fragility so the stone doesn’t have to.
Touch, hearing, sight, smell, even taste. Every nerve impulse is a clue. You have to feel what it is like to be stone, steel, glass. You must embody the material to understand it from within. Empathy is not a feeling you bring to the material. It is a discipline you develop through attention so complete that the boundary between you and the thing you are making becomes, for a moment, negotiable.
The through line isn’t the medium. It’s the score — a musical phrase that runs beneath everything I’ve made, in every material, since the beginning. An attentive viewer will recognize my line in a fragment of metalwork, a shard of mosaic, a piece of jewelry. Not because I impose it, but because I cannot suppress it. Style is what remains when you’ve done everything you can to get out of the way. The melody persists. It always comes back.
Robert Farris Thompson showed me why. In his essay on rhythmized textiles he traced the staggered patterns of Mande weaving to the off-beat phasing of African and African American music — the non-repeating pattern that is nevertheless structured, rhythmic, alive. That is not chaos. That is a different understanding of order. It changed everything about how I work, and it explains why a career that looks scattered from the outside has always felt, from the inside, like one long continuous sentence.
My study of Bakongo minkisi gave me the other half. The active ingredients of minkisi sculptures are chosen because their visual properties or name suggest the desired outcome — the material is not a vessel for meaning, it is the meaning. In the broadest sense, puns and rhymes suggest confluence. This is how I choose every material I work with. The clearest example of this idea in my own work is the first fire pit design I created— using a torch to cut flame images into a flammable gas storage tank to create a fire pit which can then be plumbed for gas is a perfect example of how I like materials and ideas to harmonize.
Sometimes I choose the material to fit the idea, sometimes I choose the idea to fit the material. But always, the material and the idea are in dialogue, a call and response.
I have been a professional artist since 1995, supporting myself through creative work since I was busking in Seattle in 1987. In that time I have worked as a poet, a musician, a designer, a metalworker, a mosaic artist. I did not move between these disciplines because I was restless. I moved because each one sharpened the next. Music and poetry were the beginning, they’re siblings. I taught myself graphic design to make books. I began making art to illustrate them. One art always subsidized the next, supporting me while I learned new skills. What always surfaced was that while the material mattered, the skill sets boiled down to the same thing: attention and dexterity, and putting everything you had back into the work.
None of it was done the way it was supposed to be done. I sold 3.5 million dollars worth of my art outside the gallery system. I bartered a mosaic to a bank as the down payment on my first house and studio. When I wanted to know something, I found a way to learn it. A great deal of what I do shouldn’t work. I know this because everyone says so, usually in considerable detail. I learned to listen for the hole in the argument — to come at the problem sideways, inverse, from an unexpected direction, to rephrase the question until it has a different answer. The universe changes whether you direct it or not. Art is the act of directing it. That requires attention, intention, and a willingness to suspend disbelief long enough to coax something into being that has never existed before.
The Museum of Mosaic Environments is the largest act of that coaxing I have undertaken. Mosaic is one of the oldest media in human history — present at the foundation of every major civilization, technically demanding, visually extraordinary, five thousand years of continuous human practice. It has never had a dedicated fine art institution. The reason is not that the work doesn’t merit one. The reason is that the hierarchies that determine what merits an institution were built by people who were not looking at mosaic when they built them.
I am looking at mosaic. I have been looking at it for thirty years. And I am building the institution.
The arc of my arts practice is a fugue. The method is the main theme, the materials are the voices, the subject matter carries the counterpoints, the final section, the stretto, is the Museum of Mosaic Environments, in which all the voices overlap.
The museum ties together everything I have been doing since the beginning — making art and curating it, teaching, building community, finding ways to sustain a practice without compromising the work or myself, telling stories, leading by example. It is not a departure from the work. It is where the work was always going.
