Artist Statement for Squareheads, 1999

The repetition of like units fills and organizes space much as the methodical work of placing them has filled my time. One may encounter such a structure in a variety of ways - with analysis, with delight, with passivity.

Ornament has preoccupied me for many years. Its basis, the grid, is a structure that is pervasive in our culture. Grids are used for the storage and display of information and for the construction and organization of our physical environment. It is not surprising that in this century the grid has also become an innovation and convention in visual art, particularly in painting.

The grid fascinates me in its dual identity as decoration and utility. It may embody both the abstract and the concrete - it is receptive to any reading yet it is already emphatically present.

Ornament as a basis for art poses questions about how I regard notions of infinity and change. When I first showed the crayon piece, all the slabs hung the same way. It was visually fascinating but also easily knowable as a system. Without meaning to, I felt as though my efforts at mastery ended up exalting a kind of monotony.

In subsequent work, I have tried to complicate the grid in order to embody unpredictability. The question that stays with me is whether the knowable infinity that ornament signifies feels like a comfort or a trap. The ornamental field as a logical and visually compelling map is of less interest to me than the seams or anomalies within it - the sites that hold the potential for something unpredictability.