This triptych and beginning of what could be a new body of work is one that has stemmed from my thoughts on totems. Each piece has a slab like shape and a very strong vertical movement. This started as one singular piece of wood in the middle and then gradually became a grouping of three through the use of another piece of rotted wood I had lying around. I cut it up into similar shapes and turned them into cast glass. The bronze nails and the variations at the tops of the glass represent a deterioration.

At first when the castings came out of the kiln, they had no optical clarity and instead were pristinely white. After a lot of thinking and playing with ways to handle the castings as standing sculptures, I’ve come to enjoy them with their sugar-like texture and white color.

As these sculptures came together I hadn’t had much of an idea in mind besides a relation to the others in terms of a place of worship and a feeling of having a specific space and placement. Now, after working them almost completely and finishing the triptych, I feel like they are definitely content-laden and I didn’t even have to create a context. The way that the nails are applied in each piece in combination with the deteriorated quality of the wood, give a very strong sense of pain. The other part, which I enjoy greatly, is that it is up to the viewer to decide where that pain stems from. It could be most present in the piece with 5 nails or most present in the piece with one nail and the top that has clearly been worn. It is this type of content and viewer based decision making that I have enjoyed so much in making sculpture.