In all my pieces I have attempted to express the spontaneity of a first quick ink-sketch of an idea; to capture my initial impulse in permanent materials. I have developed ways to achieve that over the past twenty years ranging from the early techniques in my Designer Chair and Red Free tables, (in which the white field suggests drawing paper and the bold back outlines suggest ink), to the later black bent-rod pieces which are like freehand ink sketches rendered in three dimensions.

From the outset my chairs have been metaphors for myself. The chair shape suggest and implies the human body, and of course, to use a chair is to put one’s body in full contact with the object…to be literally supported by the iconic object of our culture. The use of black steel rod as an analog of the artist’s original drawing quite naturally suggested, when grouped into clusters, organic arrangements of branches and stems. The portraits do, reaches its height in pieces from 1996 in which I use silicone as a (horrid) analog flesh. These silicone pieces play against the black rod pieces of the same year, in which there is a deliberate tension between the loveliness of branch-like arrangements, the power of bunched groups of interlacing rods, and the bleak, winterish finality of these most skeletal forms.