Thinking about how human actions intersect with the operations of the earth , I recently did a site-responsive project , called Room and Pillar , a subterranean installation in the Widow Jane Mine in Rosendale , New York , where I live . Rosendale is renown for a once-flourishing cement mining industry , and relics of this by-gone era are still evident today . The Widow Jane is a large mine within a 32-square mile seam of limestone between High Falls and Kingston , where it was often said that just as much went on underground as above .
Like the natural phenomena that inspire my work , my practice has always been such that one idea or action leads me to the next . So it was that the desire to document a body of work that I was very enthusiastic about led to my spending all of 2011 working on an artist ’ s book called Table of Contents . The book was born out of my desire to literally place my work within the context of geology . I sensed that I was connecting with an emerging force in contemporary life , and I wanted it to be expressed beyond the world of galleries and museums . Table of Contents is a catalogue of my artwork that uses the geology textbook as a conceptual template . Presenting works based on textbook diagrams in the form of a textbook had a beautiful logic to me . One of the surprises that I discovered in doing this project was that the book does not stop at chronicling a body of work ; it newly interprets it in a graphic format .
In keeping with the geological theme of my work , an important criteria for me has always been that I work in a way that is ecologically conscious . My studio functions as a kind of eco-system where I do not generate waste . Everything gets used or collected for future use . Even aesthetic decisions are informed by this mandate . For example , I make monotypes as a kind of by-product of my sculptural work . I use a heated metal plate to help erode and plane my sculptures . When done carefully , this can produce finely detailed paint trails as the mass of striated wax slides along the hot plate . I recognized this as an opportunity to use the piece-in-progress as a mark-making tool and began capturing these mini-landslides on paper as another way of recording process and time . Like thin sections of minerals being prepared for microscopy , these monotypes are the thinnest , most transparent records of my work possible .