Every entry below is listed the way it was built: who it was for, what it was made of, how long it took, and whether it is still standing. Most of it is not.
A parade piece has a harder brief than a gallery piece. It has to be light enough for a person to carry for a mile, strong enough to survive wind and rain and a crowd, and readable from forty feet away. It also has to come apart afterwards.
A wedding is the same brief at a different scale. A custom arch, or an installation for the room. Something nobody there has seen before, because it did not exist until you asked for it. If you are planning one and you want the thing in the photographs to be yours rather than rented, that is this.
A creature for Canalway’s annual lantern parade along the Towpath Trail, co-created with Eddie “Trash Fish” Olschansky and made entirely from recycled and upcycled material. Lit from inside, walked after dark.
I came to Cleveland in 2001 to assist Wendy Mahon and built a giant dandelion in my first week. I moved here for good in 2005. I have worked on the parade every year since, and I am now its production manager. That means sitting down with a group holding a drawing and working out how the thing will actually stand up, get carried, and come apart again at the end of the day.
The Museum’s Women’s Council brought me their design as staff artist. Before anything was cut we worked out a design and assembly plan together: what it was made of, in what order it went together, and how it came apart. That plan is the reason this site is laid out the way it is.
Stage work is the opposite problem from parade work. Nobody carries it a mile, but it gets handled every night by a performer who has to be able to think about the music instead of the mechanism. So the joint has to be repairable in a corridor, in the dark, in ten minutes.
Sets, props and puppets, for theater and for dance. If a company has a problem nobody has solved yet, that is the interesting version of the job.
Puppet design and build for the Cleveland early-music ensemble Les Délices, working from 17th-century French source material in bunraku-style and rod puppetry.
A second production with the same company, again as puppet designer.
“…sculptural, site-specific sets and props that solve unique problems.”
Les Délices, on why they hired him · artist interview
Site-specific means the piece is answering a question the room asked. Before I design anything I want to know what it has to interface with: the ceiling height, the sightline, the doorway it has to come through, the people who will walk past it every day.
Lead artist on a community art project at the South Branch of the Cleveland Public Library. A neighborhood making something together, in its own building, out of what it had.
A pergola. An arbor. An arch over a gate. A table for a wall that is not square, or a cabinet built around what has to go inside it. Made for one room, in one house, for the person who lives in it.
It is the same job as everything else on this site, at a smaller scale and a much longer life. You describe what you can already picture; I ask what it actually has to do, draw it, agree the plan before anything is cut, and then make it. If what you want has an obvious answer, a shop can make it more cheaply than I can, and you should let them. Come to me for the one they would say no to.
This is the only part of my work nobody has ever written about, because it does not go down the middle of a street. It is also the only category on this site where the status reads standing. Everything else came apart the week after it was finished.
The picture you carry around that nobody else can see yet. Write whatever you want changed, drop photographs in, and I’ll answer you here.
Which part do you want to talk about?