My Need My Burden

My Need My Burden, maple, walnut, oak, rose thorns, 2009

95% hand tools, bit of rotary detailing. I exhibited this along with All My Useless Outrage in God Doesn't Like Ugly in '09, an exhibit in a church, as is traditional (also happened with Hurt in '08) an irate visitor veiled the piece in a plastic bag.

The text exhibited with it in the original exhibit reproduced below:

"It was very hard to look at the world with such eyes. When you examined it coldly in this way, the claws of your eyes turned back into your head and tore it to pieces..."
Andre Schwartz Bart, ‘A Woman Named Solitude’

My sculptures draw inspiration from a spectrum of European, African and Native American traditions of ritual woodcarving. Like these traditions, my work gives wooden body to spirits, and daemons, exploring hopes and horrors simultaneously personal and universal.

God may not like Ugly, but somehow he loves them. I don’t. When we look at the Ugly, in crude form, in coarse word, in cruel, selfish action, it forces us to react, sometimes with pity, more often with horror, disgust, violent rage; we tear ourselves apart in the process.

A fat man, a self-satisfied Ugly American, is a call to contemplate not only the damage the Ugly does, but also how we are damaged, made Ugly ourselves as we look at the Ugly with hatred and match its violence with our own.

A woman with her burden explores a different kind of Ugly, the violence we do to ourselves as we try and satisfy needs we cannot understand or control, the alchemical process by which desire becomes collateral damage.

Ritual art has always encouraged us to look at the world and the Ugly it contains through transformed eyes. I hope these symbols present a challenge, to see differently and so think differently. To make the cycle of ugliness end here.