"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"
T S Eliot 'The Waste Land'
Throughout the twentieth century the modernist project in the visual arts has been an attempt to clarify how we might locate in non-narrative, non-illustrative forms an art released from the ties of the given visible world. It has been a project as much as a practice. This modernist tradition has been the foundation stone of much that I have made as a stone carver, and my work speaks of my ongoing deliberations on the possibilities of twentieth century sculpted form using traditional media. In the past my inclinations have been towards a kind of cool abstraction that avoids the distractions of representational objects. My artistic sources are formalist, the linearities of early 20th century figurative art and geometrical abstraction as they developed up to and including Minimalism. The focus is on a bold use of material and form and on the play of light on form. I am, however, powerfully influenced by my sense of belonging to the great Western tradition and to other global cultures that contribute to the possibilities of what we do.