THE CAPTURED SOUL and SOCKRATES Peppermills / Esherick museum / 2007

The 2007 theme for the Esherick show was peppermills.

I wanted to enter two works into the show, one fun and one more serious.

​The first work I created was off based of a poem I wrote called The Captured Soul.

As a lover of anatomy, I wanted to incorporate the heart as an object that had been dissected to have the soul removed, resewn and transform into a flourishing object encased in an atrium.

The soul was represented in a small carving lying next to the heart.

I turned then steam bent the maple spears growing out of the heart.

This was the beginning to a more focused shift in anatomical works.

The piece functions by turning the portion just below the copper wire having the ground pepper fall out of the bottom of the heart.

As I was thinking/designing the second work for the show while driving a long distance the concept of a sock puppet popped into my head. I felt it would a great opportunity to work on my carving technique by trying to create a super realistic wrinkled sock so I sketched what would become Sockrates.

I carved "I am the wisest sock of all, for I know one thing, and that is I know nothing" - Sockrates out of mahogany.

It was the first time I started to utilize rasps in my carvings which created the pulled cotton look.

Creating Sockrates also let me revisit the concept of using objects outside of wood in my work like the wall reliefs I created in 2004-2005. 

His head detaches to fill the cavity with pepper seeds. To use him he lifts off the zebrawood pedestal and by turning his head pepper comes out the bottom of the sock.

He was accepted in the exhibition and remains one of my favorite works to date.