About Medusa’s Raft

                  The work in Medusa's Raft continues themes of travel, and questions the need to establish or moor oneself, to achieve a stability or contentment. Steel and ceramic mono-printed wall pieces explore the formal relationships between image and object-hood, as well as alluding conceptually to stasis and movement. Pennant for Jasper and Signal make flag forms into objects of a different sort of communication.  Medusa's Raft itself pays homage to the influential nineteenth century painting by Gericault, which recounts a tragic story of betrayal, loss and mortality. My interest lies in interpreting the formal structure of the painting in a vocabulary of familiar forms, and alluding to the uncertain mixture of individual determination and chance that guides the outcome of all our rafts.

Finally, the nature of the ceramic material itself adds a paradoxical quality to these images I find appealing. Its significant mass, weight and fragility divorces these pieces from their sources, and emphasizes that things are not as they initially appear. Additionally, a viewer's recognition of the consequences of severe imbalance and collapse of a standing piece may add a psychic tension appropriate for an image of uncertain outcome.