Materials

I started making things out of wood when I was a kid. I grew up on a farm and my father built houses. I worked on his crew, and that’s how I learned basic carpentry. When you’re on a farm you make things with what’s lying around. In those days anyway, if you wanted to build a tree house, you went and looked in one of the sheds and found a pile of wood, or you used something left over, so that’s where I got the ethic of using recycled wood.

I used to do comics and drawings, but at some point I started combining carpentry and cartooning and came up with these types of sculptures that were three-dimensional, and I never really went back…until I started doing these flat pieces, which I think are somewhere between two-dimensional and three-dimensional.

I have never bought wood to build a sculpture. It’s my medium. It is found wood that I upcycle myself. It gives the piece a history beyond itself. The wood has a spirit from being used before…a mystery. It gives my work another dimension.