- I began using found objects when I was a child.

My mother gave me a box of junk just for me to be creative with.

Throughout my life I've just always kind of just picked stuff up off the ground.

Bottle caps or leaves or acorns or whatever.

My mother hated it cause she always had to clean out my pockets as I was growing up with all this stuff.

But I basically made a career out of it.

The textures and forms of the natural objects really attract me.

And over the years I've developed some skills and tricks to imitate those textures and colors.

But in the end, in my sculptures, I really want them to look as natural as possible and as though they grew into those human-like forms as opposed to my sculpting and imitation of the natural forms and textures.

So those objects, like let's say the branches, I'm finding human anatomy in those forms.

So if there's a branch and I see, I'm visualizing, I'm playing and I see a hip, a knee, a shoulder, and I start fitting those together, I try to maximize those natural forms and try to see the anatomical forms.

And then when they start coming together, my sculpting, my goal is to just blend them enough with my sculpting that it looks natural, looks like it grew that way, but still maintain that sense of beauty in nature.

That there's no way that I can fully replicate.

Then the next step is to embed a steel armature into those natural objects that strengthen them and also hold them all together into the human figure.

Then I start sculpting over that steel, hiding the steel armature inside and blending in with those natural materials with a sculpting compound that I create myself.

It is a compound that met my needs that nothing on the market did.

I needed it to air dry so that I could put the natural materials in.

If I was using a traditional clay, I'd have to fire it and then the natural materials would burn out.

I needed it to be really strong.

I wanted it to be lightweight and I wanted to be able to control the color of it.

And my compound allows me to do that.

I sculpt with it just like any other clay like substance.

It's a little trickier though.

There's cellulose fibers inside of it that hang onto each other.

So it's much more difficult to sculpt with than any other traditional clays or sculpting compounds.

But that's one of the things that gives it strength.

After years of working with these materials, I found some that work better for me than others that I appreciate.

I like the forms, I like the strength of them.

And so typically my figures are made out of white oak.

If I put a dress on the figure, it might be a pin oak branch dress or it might be the petals off of a Kentucky coffee tree that I use to create the dress or sometimes the hair on sculptures.

The most popular hair that I use, however is the tendrils off of a wild grapevine.

So the wild grapevines grow all over Missouri.

I just go in the forest, find a vine that's growing and go along and clip off the tendrils.

every 12 inches or so and it takes me about the entire winter to gather enough tendrils to use for the rest of the year.

And I do it in winter because that's when the bugs aren't out and the leaves aren't hiding all the tendrils and the tendrils are at their strongest point.

As soon as autumn comes and they turn brown, that's when I want them cause that's when they're strongest.

There's a whole process of what I've learned about how to gather materials properly so that they're good for the sculpture.

The portion of the sculptures that I am creating with my sculpting compound, I try to keep that to a minimum.

I want those natural objects to be the center of the stage, to be the star of the show.

And I want keep my sculpting to a minimum.

That said, it's still incredibly important to the whole illusion of the piece to making them look as though they grew that way.

So I am simplifying the human anatomy a little bit, merging it with natural textures, say bark textures.

But I do want to try to make them as appealing and for a lack of a better term, lovely as possible.

I do love sculpting faces and so I do take a long time crafting the faces on the sculptures to make them attractive, to be able to express an emotion.

Even though on most of the sculptures I make the face is an inch tall or less, I want that to be a focal point so that people when they look close are pleased.

When I started these sculptures, these natural figure sculptures back in college, I was discovering that I was an environmentalist.

That I really appreciated nature and wanted to preserve it.

And so the base concept through all of my work is that humans and nature are interwoven and deeply connected and we can't live without the natural world.

So that combination of human figure and natural object, although it has been done for centuries in different cultures, even way back to the Greeks, if you think of Apollo and Daphne, those ideas are not new, but I'm finding a new way to present those ideas, I hope.

And combining them with a sense that we are here at the mercy of nature and that we need to be a part of it.