Buttons

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We live at a time when visual data from the sciences — microbiology, physics, and cosmology — are among the most beautiful and compelling images we encounter. Our post-modernist perspective has moved from an aesthetic that regards portraiture, landscape, and still life as iconic representations of the true and the beautiful, to the view that the traces of sub-atomic particles and photographs of distant galaxies have more to tell us about beauty, truth and our place in the universe.

Positioned, as we are, between the very big and the very small, something must bring us back to the human scale, and I have chosen the humble button. These little circular forms (and their painted facsimiles) suggest to me individual units of being or matter, like motes in the sunlight. They represent, both formally and symbolically, all the different orders of magnitude, from sub-atomic particles through suns and galaxies. It is my intention that as viewers explore these three-dimensional encasements, they cast themselves gently into space-time and drift in a place where there is no up and down or falling and rising, but only floating as one element in the field.

Button Garments
are made from buttons and steel wire. Most have a hanger that also serves as the “head.”