head-on

About Mahogany Wall of Holes

The Mahogany Wall of Holes plays with materiality as much as it plays with negative and positive space. This sculpture started out as a solid slab of mahogany and was turned into a piece of thick, wood lace; in the end creating a piece that is comprised of more negative space then positive space. Indeed the wood in essence contains hundreds of circular frames that display numerous round voids. A question is whether the sculpture is more about the circular voids or the warm wood ‘frames’. A traditional description would list the materials as mahogany and aluminum. My description lists mahogany, air, aluminum.

That fact that this is a wood sculpture relates in directly to some of the most inspirational forms I encounter in nature – the fallen and disintegrating trees of the forests. The hole and tube-filled trunks of fallen trees are enchanting to me for their transitional shapes and shadows. As trees disintegrate and return to the soil, they become and slow moving symphony of motion and form.