I make sculptures that memorialize moments in time—of explosion, velocity, spectacle—that might be termedoperatic.” My early inspirations were Harold Edgerton’s strobe photography and the Flow-Motion imagery of science-fiction films, but recently I’ve become interested in the sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Bernini’s masterful ability to construct a physically seductive space depicting gestures of motion (and extreme emotion—fear, ecstasy) and to make that space a source of architectural strength, the very underpinnings of Rome, is what I want to take inspiration from for the next series of large scale works I embark upon. I believe there’s a place for grand architecture and public sculptures that convey radical emotion and strength at the same time, to express vulnerability and power in the contemporary urban landscape. A concentrated study of Bernini’s shaping of Rome in the 1600s, drawing upon the architectural and formal aspects of his works in terms of scale, materials, composition, and perspective, while making art in a city that prioritizes emotions and sensory experience, will allow my practice to expand and to be influenced by something greater than a purely academic inquiry.