So what’s the deal with the bones, right? All this started out with a deer ribcage and backbone. I’m from outside of Cleveland and we live in a somewhat rural area right on the outskirts of suburbia. It’s beautiful, but we get a lot of road kill. See, I pretty much think that running over, killing, harming an animal is equivalent to any same injustice done to a person and should be punished the same. There is no difference between life, in whatever form it may be in, and the fact that humanity is so pompous to think we can dispose of it at will is ludicrous and wrong. We are all members of this earth, us, the trees, the animals, the bugs, everything, and we should act as if we were a part of it, not above it.

What I’m getting at is that yes, all of these are road kill (except the elk skull and some of the bones from the deer skeleton mobile below – those were gifts from others who found them and knew I would use them). These amazing support systems that exist in all vertebrates, that are inside every one of us, have taken on a life of their own to me. I have grown a great respect for our complex skeletal structure without which we would all look like an octopus out of water. I work toward bringing out in my art the inner whisper of each bone that tells something of whom it belonged to and what it would like to become. I know this might sound silly, but I feel so honored to be able to work so intimately with them. I mean, just think of what a giant step in evolution bones were! I always feel like I'm holding a part of life itself when I have one of the bones in my hand.

It was thought in most shamanic cultures all over the world, past and even present, that life is reborn from the bones of the deceased, animal or man. There are of course, many versions of this belief. Many had trickled into the religions we know today in the form of holy resurrections and Godly deeds, yet they all point back to a very primal pastoral spirituality.

In my own practice, I want to lift these creatures out of the darkness of their horrid deaths. I want to cleanse their spirit and assure them that I will create more from them than what they had become, something beautiful, something eternal, and something people will look at, as opposed to just running over another carcass on the street without batting an eye. Therefore, I have created for them a requiem that not only exalts the victims of human carelessness, but out of something regarded as physically grotesque, I have evoked something strangely intriguing and alluring.

“Memorial to the Fallen: Those That Went Down in the Streets” is a tribute to all the raccoons that get killed every year by careless drivers. Every one of those bronze pieces is a replica of a life-sized raccoon spine. The original idea behind this was to have a very large pile of them and I intend to complete this project to it’s full potential. As it stands now, each bronze spine stands for 6,000 raccoons. There are 30 of them in that pile.

The elk skull’s “Death Mask” started out as being another version of the deer skulls at the top of the page. I began taking the mold of the top of his head and when I was taking the wax out, part of it completely ripped off and I had to struggle to get any of the rest of it out in one piece. What I did manage to pry out was this oddly torn, yet very authentically textured piece that fit perfectly on top of the elk’s head. At first I just parked the wax piece on his head just for the sake of putting it someplace while I figured out what to do with it. Then one day I realized I was looking at my answer all along. I invested the wax, buffed and polished it and then I painted some designs on certain parts of its contours. The final product is what is in the pictures, and striking though it is, it doesn’t feel quite complete to me yet. I’m working on it. . . .

“Death Mask” and “Memorial to the Fallen” are both commemoratory monuments for those they represent. They are a continuation from the deer skulls in that they toy with the idea of impermanence and permanence, where bones will disintegrate over time and bronze will be the artifact left behind. They are also reminiscent of relics, a tradition I am fascinated by, and I intend to incorporate more of those ideas in future sculptures.

In “Resurrection,” I have created a creature that rose from a pile of bones and mysteriously hovers, gently floating as he prepares to take full flight. I wanted him to be the spirit of the bones, not necessarily being exactly what the bones used to be, but something beyond the confinements of the bones’ original structure. It’s as if the bones themselves assembled in their own way, becoming the core being, the pure true essence of the deer it used to be.

Let me put it this way. It has been thought throughout the centuries that there are two planes of existence, our mortal reality and a spiritual God plane. Everything that exists in our plane has a heavenly counterpart in the spiritual plane. Ok, so if that’s too far out there then consider our world consisting of several other dimensions on top of the four we know. Since each dimension is nested in the one above it, our world would exist in the higher dimensions as well, though obviously in a completely different form. (Think Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.) That is just two kinds of ways to think about what I’m getting at. Everything and every one in our world has a pure essence that transcends our outward appearance that exists in a realm both deep within us, deep within everything, and high above and beyond us all.

Before I began painting any of the bones, I meditated with one of them in order to ask what the best thing would be to paint. In my meditation, I saw ephemeral flowers and natural forms and I based the designs after that. Each bone is uniquely painted, thick with the gold celestial patterns and floral inspirations. This patterning is depicting the result of their resurrection, as if somehow a holy light had left an imprint on each one, calling them together to form a whole.

In the third detail down amongst the first set of images, I have a picture of how my bone friend was installed at school. I zigzagged gold and bronze crocheted rope all across the top of the half octagonal space I had to display everything in. My creature hung straight down from the 30-foot ceiling amidst the web of gold. Because of this configuration, my creature had the freedom to move around and would circle ever so slowly, moving his head from side to side. He somehow gained a strange life of his own suspended like that. I had hung him perfectly at eye level so as he swayed slowly around, he could turn his gaze right at anyone passing by.