>> Because of my sensibility to the arts, I enrolled at Tyler School
of Art, part of Temple University.
I did my undergraduate there.
It was a survey course that you took all media, you know, painting, drawing, print making,
metal, and for me, for whatever reason,
I gravitated towards more three dimensional reality.
I felt that graphic work was very illusionistic, and it didn't deal with gravity,
it didn't deal with space, it didn't deal with what I deal
with as a human, you know, walking through space.
So I gravitated three dimensional form.
So I did my undergraduate work in sculpture, and I minored in metal.
I became fascinated with metal and metal technology, and I did my master's degree
in goldsmithing, and initially designed pieces of jewelry.
And the jewelry was, it wasn't a fashion accessory,
but it was in relationship to the human body.
So the question was how does the jewelry, you know, manifest the human form and human gesture.
The personality of the viewer didn't really come into it.
I let the client find the work, but.
So there is that relationship of the human psyche, of how someone wants
to present themselves and how they identify themselves in reference to what they wear.
So it's basically ego manifestation.
As the work developed, and my work got larger, I went from jewelry to decorative arts.
I designed furniture and became associated then with architecture.
And so, initially, it was the object on the human body
and then it was the human body walking through the object.
So there's a sense of connectiveness and kind of an aspect of humanism involved with that,
and a lot of my works in the public arena is one of kind of pedestrian enrichment and part
of the softening of the urban environment.
So with use, with the use of steel, it has to do primarily with structure
that you can fabricate something, a very large scale.
I mean, even, well, bronze, there's large bronze sculptures, but bronze is not too stable.
So you have to have an interior structure of probably stainless steel that you hang this on.
So steel allows me the greatest flexibility, mainly because of scale requirements.
Also, the way we work with the material by using heat.
We can, a lot of my forms are very complex and organic.
So bending the steel and, you know, heating it
and compressing it adds a whole new form vocabulary rather
than just geometrically putting things together.