In 1955 I had the opportunity to spend a month in Japan. The experience disoriented me, so to speak. Six years old, it was my first visit to another country. Since then, and especially during my childhood, with five years in Greece and two in Taiwan, my life has been a process of orienting myself in a world that didn't offer much tangibility but rather left me with an understanding of things bigger than myself and my own country and culture.

This body of work is an effort to orient myself in the world of glass sculpture. The artistic sensibilities I'm working with are broad and come from cultures I've experienced both first and second hand. They are also architectural and sculptural. They areoriental and occidental. Optical glass itself also requires an orientation, one of how it fits into a particular environment, how it's affected by that environment. Natural and artificial light affect how the sculpture feels, it's mood. It's a never static experience and requests a constant renewal of orientation. To me, optical glass is the medium that is most alive. It has transmission, refraction, and reflection. And I think it's emotionally alive as well, reflecting how each one of us is feeling that day. And almost always it adds a positivity to the sense of that particular day.

I owe my deconstructive aesthetic to having spent in Greece as a teenager. Ancient ruins were everywhere and I got used to seeing pieces of columns laying on the ground. It seemed natural in that time has it's natural affects. And it also represented the freedom of democracy, which was enhanced by the invention of the Greek alphabet. That freedom is also artistic freedom and so I feel an affection for those symbols of the beginnings of that liberation from tyranny, the beautiful and inspiring temples and statues that are the hallmarks of that civilization. Artistic and architectural freedom became the symbols of political freedom. And so the whole notion has inspired me to create my own symbols: to the idea of artistic exploration and orienting oneself and illuminating my subconscious impulses, making them conscious, and understanding what it is I like about certain colors and shapes.

So they all represent me, different aspects of me as I travel through ethereal and corporal space, seeking expression and beauty, the eternal and the temporal; all parts of reality, all expressions of the possible. The exploration. Internal and external.