As an object maker I am always on the look-out for things to cast and there are always lots of bones hanging around the studio.  I am drawn to bones as objects.  Bones are always such nice shapes, all those complex curves.  They are of a nice scale that can be held in the hand.  I can’t pick up a bone without speculating about the form that has generated the bone.  It’s a simple structural calculation.  If you have the bone, you have the whole creature.  The form of the creature is implicit in the bone.

But it gets a bit more complicated.  I am now working with casts made from a human skeleton.  As I pour the wax or break away the plaster, I find I cannot be unaware that I am casting something that has been living, that has walked the earth and is now defunct.  As I work away through the technically complex casting ritual I find part of me wondering: was this an adult or juvenile?  was it male?  female?  was it healthy?  was it happy?  Working in the studio, as the pieces accumulate I am struck by how arresting it is to see multiples of human remains.  Not too arresting, I hope - I want to avoid any sense of the crudely sensational.  Also, how odd to see crystalline replicas of recognizably human artifacts.

What’s that all about?  Why is that so?  I realize part of the explanation is that human remains are taboo, sacred.  The only time a person is going to see masses of human bones is either in the context of the sacred (ossuary, reliquary); or in the context of atrocity - not a proper sight for human scrutiny nor a proper topic for idle conjecture.

Ossuary 501: a bifocal inquiry into the idea of bones as artifacts and highly charged signifiers of human absence.

                              - excerpt from show proposal, Toronto Free Gallery, 2006