I am surrounded by people and things that I love. That encircling includes items that were made or salvaged or rescued by those to whom I am, in some fashion, attached, or by myself, and I am in continuous reflection on the connections that my environment prompts. I am, in general, deeply affected by my habitat. Aesthetics are paramount to my sense of pleasure and to my overall wellbeing.

If I make a one week stand in the Buckaroo Motel in Tucumcari, New Mexico, the room is reinvented according to my pleasing. If I am driving cross country, from Baraga to Bisbee say, my car is my mobile home and adorned, like my more stationary residence, with the objects of well wishing and safe travels that are presented to me: an iron pocket goddess, a glow in the dark Virgin Mary, a small tin of assorted good will objects, an Hopi crow, basalt from Lake Superior and even red dirt from Conchas, New Mexico.

The desire to create is not unrelated to the desire for beauty and, in my case, poetry and the physical reminders and remnants of a life lived, of lives lived, the lives being the living done by those whom I love or have loved or who have, in some fashion, crossed my path.

I emphasize the poetry because that is the drive beneath all others. The first thing that I remember being absolutely immersed in was writing and in particular writing poetry. A newly minted teen I knew that a small press and learning bookbinding was in my future. But somehow that love, a love of books, of old books, of typography, of objects with history and or making do with what is reclaimed or repurposed evolved into a delight in the old and metal and then in the making of metal objects and then in the business that is METAL.

People like to know what it is that I do with the sorts of things that are sold in the gallery or that John and I, and now Drew, might design and fabricate. So, with the help of friend and photographer Patrick Young (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~patyoung/) I am including some ways in which I have utilized the treasures that come to me or that I have rescued and resuscitated. Patrick was set loose to find the collections and assemblages that caught his eye - like most of how my my living flows - it all amounts to the acts and spirit of collaboration.