Artist's Statement

     I do direct carving in stone and make bronzes, often using the stone as part of the process. My sculpture is usually based on the human form, primarily the female nude.  I often carve torsos or fragments of the body, believing that the part can be as expressive as the whole. The sculptures are in a sense totem objects that celebrate our ordinary every day life. Their function, as in prehistoric or primitive sculpture, is to reveal and revere -- to make magic. We can see in nature an organic energy and essential beauty, a power that has the force of a religious experience: an illumination, an intuitive flash wherein we glimpse our original nature. In my sculpture, through reduction and simplicity of form, balance and tension, and interaction with the material, I seek this revelation.

     To name it always falls short. One must use contradiction and paradox, freely choosing elements from the rational and the intuitive, classical and romantic, abstract and figurative, beginning each time with the unknown.

     My sculpture is my response to nature and art. There is a long struggle to develop the skill and vision that allows the freedom for a spontaneous response. It is based on intimate experience with the sensual, tactile images of life, but not solely dependent on the visible. Working through the known to the unknown, I use the human form, and sometimes animals, to penetrate the mystery and express spirit.

     What interests me most is the timeless element in the art of all periods and places My sculpture has always been a composite and synthesis of elements drawn from nature and the history of art. With sandstone in particular (perhaps affected by their rude nature), I seem to move backward through time from classical to archaic to prehistoric-- to the unknown form in the formless. Through more and more reduction, down to elemental forces of rock and earth, I seek a unity that expresses something more than the visible.

--Anita Huffington








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