Artist’s Statement:

The creative process began with the removal of a 9-foot copper sheet from deep within our Shannon ketch, Hannah (it had been used as a grounding plate for an old single-side-band radio). Over the 45 years that this copper sat in the bilge of our boat, it gained the beautiful browns, blues, and greens that aged copper carries. And it brought to mind the way 18th-century British wooden warships used sheets of copper hand-nailed to their hulls to help protect the wood from ocean organisms. I’d read that during this period, an average of 15 tons of copper was used to sheathe a hull in this protective barrier. (And of course, more recently in history, copper was used in bottom paints for the same purpose). Submerged historic wrecks have been found with the copper-bottomed hull intact while the rest of the wooden ship had long since rotted away.

While our own original copper sheet got moved around the garage for years after we removed it from Hannah, it also got me thinking about using copper as a medium for my art. I started experimenting with burnishing various shapes into the copper and then, watching the way shadows played across the uneven surfaces, I began hand-cutting shapes out of the panels to reveal the wall behind. Padding out the copper sheets by mounting them on hand-crafted mahogany frames amplified the shadowing effect of the sails and other images. In this way, I achieved my desired effect of “movement” on a stationary three-dimensional wall sculpture.