Load Bearing Series
There's a building somewhere in Italy — or there was — that stood for over five hundred years. I have a piece of it on my workbench.
That's where this series starts. Not with an idea, but with material. Brick, timber, hand-forged metal, carved stone — things that were made to carry weight, literally. Pieces I've been collecting for decades from places I've been and people I've met, pulled from demolitions, salvage yards, and the occasional church that didn't survive the century.
What draws me to these objects isn't age for its own sake. It's the evidence of use. The way a beam gets compressed differently depending on where it sat in a structure. The patina on metal that only comes from a specific combination of moisture, time, and whatever was stored nearby. These things can't be faked and they can't be recreated — they just are what they are, and they carry that with them.
Each piece in this series brings some of those elements together — materials from different centuries, different continents, different original purposes — into a single structure. Sacred next to domestic. Industrial next to hand-carved. The mark-making woven through the work pulls from architectural patterns, ancient symbolic geometry, the visual languages humans have always used to try to make sense of where we came from and what holds us up.
I'm not trying to answer those questions. I'm not sure anyone can. But I think there's something in living with objects that carry that weight — literally and otherwise.