Sculpture: prayers from the thin place
There is something different about holding a piece of wood that has spent decades outside——the weight of it, the way the grain has opened and darkened, the places where the surface has given way to something more honest underneath. I can't explain exactly why that matters, but it does. It matters in the same way a thin place matters: not because of what you can see, but because of what you can feel pressing through.
My sculptures begin there——in salvaged wood, concrete, steel. Materials that have already lived, already weathered, already accumulated a kind of quiet history. I don't work against that history. I try to honor it, to let the natural patinas and imperfections speak rather than covering them over. There is a Japanese concept for this——wabi-sabi——the beauty of things that are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. I didn't set out to work within that tradition, but I recognize it in what I make.
What I am building, in each piece, is something closer to a prayer totem than a sculpture in the conventional sense. Not an object to be looked at so much as a place to return to——a physical anchor between the ordinary world and the holy one. The Celtic tradition speaks of thin places as locations where heaven draws close to earth, where the veil between the seen and unseen becomes almost transparent. I believe objects can hold that quality just as places can. A piece of sculpture, made with intention and prayer, can become a thin place in its own right.
The act of making is itself a form of communion. When I am working——hands on material, weight and texture and resistance——I am not separate from the prayer. The studio becomes a place of meditation. Each decision, each mark, each thing left rough or smoothed, is a kind of conversation with God about what this object is becoming.
When someone stands in front of one of these sculptures, I hope they feel that conversation still present in the material. Not as a concept, but as a felt thing——a stillness, a gravity, an invitation to slow down and consider what lies just beyond what the eye can see. These are objects made for contemplation. For the longings that don't have words. For the thin place, wherever you find it.
