STATEMENT
	I recently spent three weeks scuba diving off of Little Corn Island, a speck of land thirty miles from the Nicaraguan coastline.  At one point, I knelt on the ocean floor as three Great Hammerhead sharks circled me.  I'm now back in Iowa and I'm transposing the essence of this experience into my next sculpture.      This is what drives me to sculpt: The desire to take these fleeting moments and transform them into metal.  My influences come from direct experience - whether it's in the western Himalayans, watching Tibetan prayer flags waving in the wind, humpback whales breaching the waters of the Icy Straits in southeast Alaska, or ground fog lifting from a Midwestern cornfield.     These images merge in my memory with a line of poetry or an illustration from a childhood book of Greek mythology - whatever resonates.  I make these chimeras permanent through the medium of cast metal sculpture.