Artist's Statement 1

The expression of an artist's intelligence through the manipulation of materials is sculpture. Intelligence includes body intelligence. Materials include any and every thing. A sculptor's intent determines whether the sculpture is the act or the object. There is always an action, sometimes resulting in a sculptural object and sometimes leaving only the residue of the action.

Stelae, column, lingam, figure are an architecture of the body heralding the psyche. These forms are essential to opening a larger space where I can move, that the psyche can occupy.

The movement originates from a center matrix. A body in motion. A mass in flux. The edge of the motion is the sculptural surface, where the play of light makes the form real to our eye as a bump in the dark makes it real to our touch, body, mind.

Artist's Statement 2

1) I would like to say nothing and just have people look at and touch the sculpture.

2) I would like to have the sculpture touch, and help to liberate our psyches. Psyches need a large space -- our psyches need to fly. Psyche is the Greek word for both butterfly and for mind-spirit.

3) In the Dhamapada, an ancient Buddhist text, it says, "...your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it." That is the creative process, whether making clay sculpture or writing a poem -- to lose oneself in the process.

4) "...Art is an unlimited path..." Tayamo, the luminous Zapatec painter, is truthful.

5) Clay is history. Scientists now believe that first life began in it. A creation myth says that Jehovah formed the first man out of it. Some of the oldest surviving artifacts of culture are made of it. Clay holds the fossils of some earliest forms of life in its own fossilized shape, in shale.

6) Clay seems like it's just sticky mud, but its particles are flat and slide against one another making it capable of fantastic modeling feats. It's like a three-dimensional photograph of an action, a motion, emotion, a thumbprint, or the whack of a paddle.

7) These are sculptures of my energies, motions, thoughts -- the movement in my studio. They are figurative -- and they are about more than the figure.

...to use figure as a vehicle to a deeper space, a physical place where understanding is possible.

The understanding is not vague or grand, but precise and fragmentary.

In my dream, I had to choose between the flat simple stroke of a comic book world or the reality of light playing over a tree in full leaf. I did not know how to start the painting so I pinched it in clay, years later.

Complexity is easier to paint on a three-dimensional surface.

- Amy Evans McClure