Guardians

The Guardians trace a single idea across two decades and several materials: turning the nature of form of a fossil, a figurative relationship into a monumental gesture: it becomes a figurative form with arms or wings lifted skyward - or at times it confirms the location of being embedded or rooted to the ground, confirming a grounding of sorts, binding us to the history of physical residue. 

My guardians are all based on the shape of a small fossil — a petrified shark's tooth found on beaches across North America. Looking at them in my hand, these fossils resolve into something unexpectedly figurative: a body caught mid-gesture, reaching or rising, a form that is fluid and oddly alive.

The Guardians series takes that resemblance seriously, returning to it in stone, in bronze, at scales from the hand-sized to the monumental.
The Guardian (2004), carved in white Italian marble, was the first full statement of the form — a nearly nine-foot figure standing with the quiet authority of something keeping watch. Texas Guardian (2006) reworked the idea in Texas limestone, a rougher, warmer material that gave the same  gesture a different weight and presence. Nike (2022) returned to marble — Carrara white and Bardiglio — and named the connection outright: viewers of the earlier Guardians had repeatedly likened their ascending form to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and Nike is my acknowledgment of that lineage, carved at a scale close to a maquette but resolved as a finished, independent work.
Alongside these are smaller studies and variations — Small Guardian, Angel, Piccolo Angelo, and an early version of Angel — works that let me test the gesture at intimate scale before it returns, each time, to something larger and more permanent. Shadow of a Guardian is a more monumental confirmation of a field of experience. It was shown in an exhibition where the viewer would walk among the dark objects, things that seem familiar, but rest unknown.

Together, the Guardians are less a single sculpture repeated than a question asked again and again: what does it mean for something this old — a fragment of a creature that outlived its own species by millions of years — to still read, to any viewer, as a figure standing guard, as a nature of form reminding us of our belonging to the world.