The Alien Series

I spent fourteen months living in Ireland on sabbatical in an attempt to recover from burnout and depression. I did photography, drawing and painting, and I wandered a lot. Upon returning to my studio in the States I found I could not work, which I was not expecting. At that time I considered going back to school in order to learn to do something totally different, but I wasn’t quite ready to make that big of a change. I spent a few months as a guest artist at SUNY New Paltz. I made myself so miserable with trying to make something completely different with clay that I was finally ready to return to my own studio and to “dig in.” The first series of work was called the Alien Series. I named it this because I had been a registered alien living in Ireland, but also because of the movie "Aliens" and the memory of the new life forms pushing from the inside out. These pieces were made by pushing from the inside out, and then burnishing the whole surface. Nobody liked them or bought them.