MOST importantly, I consider myself a landscape sculptor-- by which I do not mean that I bounce about on bulldozers: there are scars enough on the land. Rather, the forms and patterns that I find in my travels, especially in ice, give me an armature for my intellectual, emotional, visual explorations and probings in metal, as well as glass, stone, and other materials. These emerge from my deep appreciation of the natural world, and my distress at the insults, many of them irrevocable, that it receives from our species. This environmental subtext is not presented in an obviously illustrative kind of way, but woven into a metaphorical fabric.

In the quest for authenticity and vocabulary in my sculptural voice, I travel a great deal. In 1999, I became the first sculptor from any country to be sent to Antarctica, courtesy of the National Science Foundation and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. I lived primarily on the largest non-nuclear icebreaker in the world, the USCG Polar Sea, and spent numerous hours observing from her helicopters. In autumn 2001 I spent five weeks on Canada's largest icebreaker, the 'Louis S. St-Laurent', in the Lancaster Sound area of the high Arctic, which also involved numerous helo flights over land, sea, and ice. This trip was made possible by a grant from the Rhode Island Foundation. In 2006 I returned to 'The Ice' (Antarctica), again courtesy of the National Science Foundation. Activities during this trip included descents into crevasses, flying to Pole as 'cockpit observer' (and photographer) in an LC-130 military transport plane, a residency with a glaciology science team in the Dry Valleys, and yet more helo photo flights. Other trips to nourish my work have included New Zealand (five times), Alaska tidewater glaciers, Scotland (twice), Central America (thrice), central Sahara Desert, American Southwest, Egypt, and others. Photography from some of these trips appears in the Sources section, and is the genesis for works on paper.

In keeping with my attempts to tread as lightly as possible on the earth, my metal pieces are fabricated from very thin sheets; this means that despite a massive appearance they are quite light and easy to move, install, and hang, a feature that has been appreciated by numerous clients public and private. They are intended to reflect the beauty of the natural sources from which they emerge. They also make note of the poor state of affairs between us and rest of the biosphere, and the challenge we have to repair it. I hope that these pieces will be seen as celebrations of this challenge--the most significant we have ever faced-- in all its complexity and internal contradiction, and regarding the achievability of a positive outcome, as monuments to hope.

  Use the navigation device on the left side of the page to explore each series of my work.

GW