I think that of all the work that I'm doing now. Everything has a surface that you might compare to a skin. These are all objects crafted from the outside-in or the inside-out. They have a wax surface applied to them, and that has layers, irregularities, differences in texture and density. It gives it almost a fleshy feeling. They have a distinct surface.

Some of the pieces here are still in their concrete form, and most of these are made out of some kind of foam armature, metal, or wire, and then covered with concrete. That's what gives them their distinct shape and their rigidity, and that's also where the texture of the surface that is going to come later starts. It's scraped and sort of trowelled, and some parts are smooth and shiny; some parts are dull. Then I'll cover that with wax, in differing layers, and then once again, I'll work with the wax. I burnish it or smooth it or scrape it. I'm going for a kind of burnished, shiny finish to the wax.
 

That's always the hardest question. It's hard to separate artists you know and have worked with from famous artists whose work you may have never seen in person, but that you really love and have been inspired by.

I guess I'd start with Rachel Whiteread, who does cast interiors and cast objects. When I first saw her work, I felt like I was seeing something that I was trying to figure out how to do myself. So at the time when I saw her (I think it was "ghost" -- a piece in London that was a cast inside of a house), I had been casting parts of floors and walls and corners in the studio. That influenced me because it made me realize that my experimentation was certainly recognized in someone else's work, so that I should keep at it.
 

I think I want to communicate ideas about objects. About how objects relate to each other, about how they relate to where they are, where they're being viewed or where they're exhibited, or how something relates to the floor it's sitting on. Also how the shape or form of an object relates to its materials -- what it's made out of.

I like to think about how something would feel if it was made out of the opposite material. All the work I make is heavy in feeling -- physically heavy, but not visually heavy. It's interesting to think about what these shapes say visually in contrast to what they actually are. It's hard to decipher what they're made out of. I don't think anyone could really guess without having a conversation about it beforehand. So I'm interested in that. And it's not that I'm interested in deceiving or playing a trick on the viewer; I'm interested in presenting another version of the truth or another version of your expectations of a certain material or a certain shape.
 

I would like to be a racecar driver.