Crosses
I began making crosses because I had been struck by two things. Crosses are ubiquitous in our culture. They are on the fronts of churches and around people’s necks. Yet, their ability to signify anything specific has faded to the point of invisibility. Who really “sees” those crosses? The essayist and novelist Walker Percy wrote about a similar erosion in Christian words, saying “The old words, God, sin, grace, redemption now tend to be either exhausted, worn smooth a poker chips and signifying as little, or else are heard as the almost random noise of radio and TV preachers.” He believed the Christian writer must be cunning and devious, because he is working with a “vocabulary which must be either discarded or somehow miraculously rejuvenated.”
My early crosses were made with the idea that they might be appropriate for churches. As time went on, I determined it was better to just concentrate on the imagery than to imagine an audience. Most recent crosses have been made for individuals. There are multiple versions of the salt lick cross, and of the broken tablet cross. Though formally these crosses are related, each cross differs in its size, shape, and composition. You can see pictures of cows licking the salt blocks by going to the “Sculpture” tab and then clicking on “other substances.”
