You might say Return Journey is whimsical.  Woven Works Park is playful too. The whole thing is based on denim.  Now, I never intend to make a joke or think of it as funny. If it’s a whimsical thing, I’m trying to bring it some kind of depth, or try to find some type of depth.

Even Collection Point… there’s a number of ways to see it.  It’s whimsical in a way, because it’s a bunch of recycling container lids.  It’s unexpected. It’s also monumental in a way, a very Stonehenge kind of primitive spatial design, but it’s these trash can lids essentially, right?

It is monumental in its form but it’s also very whimsical.  It’s got a twist.

There is something to trying to figure out what the tone is of the project, right?  If you have a propensity toward a certain kind of form, say ones that are very geometric or monumental or something, you have to reconcile that with the project.  I mean, Pete’s like that in a way. It is very geometric, it’s spatial, so it’s kind of more serious ‘space making’ or organized geometry, but it’s in the name of something that’s not as serious. It’s not a heavy topic, so that gave me the license to do that.  It feels good to find something that’s lighthearted but then to mine it and see what comes out of it.

I could have said, well, Pete is peacock, and it could be a sculpture of a peacock. And there’d be a little story, you’d read the story, it’s heartwarming, but I wanted to dig into it: How far does this go? What is a peacock?  Is there anything there that has more to do not just with the story of Pete but with the park itself, the shapes, the way the paths are? And that starts informing the piece. To take it seriously. To take a whimsical thing and to take it seriously. That’s fun.

And Collection Point:  I’ve got all this steel and it’s fabricated and there’s holes and geometries and alignments and everything and these are all processes that are engineered and so on… and I think painting the community’s markings on them–it’s a raw process, right?  Stenciling paint on there–it’s exciting to me, it’s so different than the rest of it that it’ll be interesting, it’ll bring it back to earth. Make it human, you know what I mean?

It has to be unplaceable.  You might think, maybe, you want this pristine thing, especially if there’s geometry involved, and parts and everything, and… and then it’s interesting to me to break that, to destroy that thought, to upend it.  Make it non-precious. A little bit unexpected.

Because the minute you can define it, it becomes uninteresting.

Chattanooga, collection point, Greensboro, Minneapolis, RE: Pete, Return Journey, woven works park