Differentiating the perceptual experience of my work with the eye and the experience navigated with the body is not meant to partition perception. This division is meant to investigate how I can alleviate the emphasis of using the analytical eye as the prime source of experience and open the possibilities of expanding how I negotiate my experiences with the body. In short, this division is meant to make it easier to articulate how the body is used as a receptor for a fully informed experience.
Understanding my work as more than just a collection of emblematic material or an instigator for symbols allows for a temporal investigation of the work. This perception of the work examines my understanding of being with objects and the meaning of that relationship. My concept of sculpture is expanded and redefined as a sculpture-body that encompasses a group of accumulative traces of movements through the world. The material is not used in my work to produce an image of an experience; the experience itself is present in a symbiotic state. The material itself owns a particular ‘meaning’ that is in relation to form and body. A meaning created by perceptual reflection, such as metaphor or the symbolic, occurs after the primary reactive experience of the creative process. The material that constitutes the form does not have meaning because it signifies another source outside of itself; the meaning gestates from the experience of the material. A total involvement of a sculpture-body is a symbiotic relation of these instances: primary, post-primary and reflective perception. Again, my work does not have meaning because it signifies another source of information; instead, the work holds the meaning in relation to the object and context. The reiteration of form produces a result that emphasizes the being or presence of the form’s material properties. The repetition of my activities and the reiteration in the resulting objects point back to my sculpture as an embodiment of events and circumstances.
My investigations with material and body have brought to my attention that the coexistence of the physical combined with analytical and optical experiences can substantiate our understanding of objects. To realize meaning beyond symbols, metaphors and images is a strategy prevalent in realizing the total impact of my work. This idea is not restricted or unique to an understanding of objects. This is the way of being in the world; people relate to the concept of a sculpture-body due to their living in the condition of existence. The purpose of recognizing this mode of being is to access the experience that lies beneath the surface of things. I suggest that my work requires an access point other than that which the interpretation of reflective language can provide.
This approach is labour intensive; it asks us to re-shape our way of understanding our relationship to objects, primarily rethinking the role of ‘bodily contemplation’ contained by the experience of a sculpture-body. To accept ‘bodily contemplation’, one must consider material possessing an essence beneath us, a place before thought, therefore containing substance that is not accessible by means of symbols, metaphor or devices of language.