Artist's Statement

Why Saints?

My first contact with saints came when as a little Presbyterian kid I found a tiny plastic statue of St. Christopher, in a leather case, in a parking lot. I picked it up and put it in my pocket (thus unknowingly allying myself with St. Dismas, patron of thieves). I didn't know much, but I vaguely knew that I'd found a religious object. I felt comfort. No matter how humble the image, it seemed to me to intimate a binding of the spiritual and physical, something everyone longs for at some point in their life. Years past. I forgot my little St. Christopher until I studied European medieval literature and then taught it. Saints, of course, are a major theme. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, saints, in a way, trot along with the pilgrims. I started to feel like those pilgrims. I started thinking of saints as spiritual aunts or uncles, figures who could give you advice and compassion without large doses of the doctrine you might get from parents. I ended up editing Catholic theological books for fifteen years, many of the books about or by saints. Finally, I wearied of words and started trying to carve my own images of saints. I had no training, no idea what I was doing. I just went into a garage and started trying to make statues of saints.

Why make images of saints now? Saints are largely narratives: they're stories of the way individuals approached a trial-despair, sickness, rejection-and, through various forms of discipline, came through it with dignity and the deepest forms of knowledge. Like millions of other people, when I come to very bad or very good times, my mind frequently goes off and settles on some saint as an example and refuge: St. Francis speaking of joy while dying in extreme pain; St. Thérèse seeing her mundane tasks as a form of prayer; Buddha being rock-still for weeks under the Bodhi tree; St. Kevin in prolonged ecstatic prayer while tiny birds nested in his out-stretched hands. Saints, then, offer not only solace and human examples but also forms of practice-both contemplative and worldly-that lead us away from distractions that make us fragmented and on to insight that gives a semblance of wholeness. Enough words. I said I'd given them up.



The Process

This is the process we use to make the pieces: I carve the original of each image in clay, using dental tools. Before making each piece I read extensively about the saint, but once I begin carving I don't look at any other depictions or think much about what I'm doing. I try not to think. As to the statues, when the original carving seems to me to be finished, I make a latex mold. Once the mold has cured, I begin to cast the pieces myself. I use cast stone (gypsum with some metal powders and other materials), painstakingly working a slurry of the substance into each mold by hand in order to get all the details. Once the piece sets, I demold it, trim it, and hand it over to my wife, Karen, who paints and glazes each piece by hand. All the statues can go outside. The process for the medals is roughly the same, though they are cast in lead-free pewter. We work from an old gas station in downtown Natchez, Mississippi. We're lucky. The saints have been with us, as they were with the pilgrims on the way to Canterbury. May the saints be with you also.