The Virtues and Vices Series began with the construction of Love – Caring, an ambitious work created for the multi-state South Carolina Arts Commission exhibition Threshold: Contemporary Art and Spiritual Life exhibition curated by New York-based critic and curator Eleanor Heartney. The exhibition was located in ten places of worship in Charleston including funeral homes. I created a work for the Fielding Home for Funerals, one of the oldest and largest African-American – owned funeral homes in South Carolina.
After visiting the site and experiencing its atmosphere, I designed a work that I hoped would offer comfort to those who encountered it. Ironically, on the evening of the exhibition opening, all of the lights failed. Although the installation was briefly left in darkness, the experience of creating Love – Caring proved transformative. I found the process so rewarding that the virtues and vices themselves became the foundation for an ongoing series. Completed works include Love – Caring, Generosity, Fortitude, Patience, Fidelity, and Anger. Gluttony is currently in progress, and I intend to continue exploring the remaining virtues and vices.
Artists often draw upon deeply personal experience, and in doing so contribute to a larger record of our shared history. Throughout generations, the virtues and vices have provided fertile ground for artistic reflection. For me, however, it is generosity – expressed through the willingness to share one’s experiences, vulnerabilities, and insights – that ultimately defines the spirit of the artist.
Generosity, in particular, is an homage to artists who have accepted the ethical responsibility of engaging difficult conversations and who have given more of themselves than their profession alone demands. Their willingness to serve others through their work has shaped my understanding of what artistic practice can be.
The Virtues and Vices Series has also allowed me to unite my drawing and sculptural practices more completely than in earlier bodies of work. Many of the pieces are interactive, incorporating books or written components that invite viewers to contribute their own thoughts and experiences. These responses become part of the artwork itself, extending its structure, enriching its meaning, and transforming the work into an ongoing dialogue between artist and audience.
The elements in these objects are not to be viewed only as ornamentation, and the details within the works should be carefully considered, as they are intended to convey message. These mimetically stated, symbolic objects have an even richer abstract metaphorical language inherent in their shared use of the materials and in the content of the craft used to produce them. As objects, they have a familiar formal and informal ritual base. This combination of commonly used objects, enhanced by aged surfacing and underlying message, offer the most possibilities for exploration of visually communicating the emotional and for providing increased content readability. With a likeness in character between the form choice and the content, the related visual and written parts of these works are accessible and can, I believe, produce associations from common experiences found within the interactions of many families, especially in the South. In these works, an understanding of a settled generation past and the very real and transient present, with its emotional and ethical struggles, join and give support to each other in this separation. Both magnify the continuum of the universal, leveling effect of time on all who long for an everlasting reunion.