Sculling by David Carr Wire sculpture: 56 x 28 x 14 inches. (Click image for blowup.)

"As the son of an English missionary I underwent the rigors of life in poor and politically unstable African countries. At the age of eleven, I was sent to boarding school in England, where I became familiar with a very different style of life. In this setting I learned to value hard work, and developed a strong sense of self-reliance. Since settling in the USA, I have found my broad background a valuable asset in dealing with it's multicultural society.

As a teacher, I try to create an environment that fosters discovery and self-expression. By understanding who and what we are in relation to both our immediate and our global environment, I believe we are better equipped to participate in the world. Though our world is undoubtedly shrinking, I wonder if we are all comfortable operating in such a world.

There is a complex and mutually supportive relationship between my own art and my teaching. My work is designed to refresh the looker's capacity to engage with an actual, existing world. Insofar as it uses abstraction, it does so, in order to drive the viewer back to the real. Nothing is more real than young people seeking a sustainable relationship with the world they will shortly find themselves in. My sense of the intricacy and difficulty of this process has added urgency to my own search for a way to compress and display the entire world within the cool confines of an art installation.

I hope that people who look at my work will undergo a complex negotiation with themselves. Our characteristic posture in regard to something we expect will be 'art' is aesthetic and abstract: we anticipate being challenged to notice formal arrangements and relationships to tradition. I am trying to disturb this posture and in fact to displace the viewer's focus from aesthetic to the symbolic. Through clues embedded in the choice and arrangement of my materials, juxtapositions, visual references and verbal allusions, I hope to create a situation in which audiences respond not simply to the image before them but to the meanings they attach to these images. I am reaching for psychological and imaginative responses far more than for analytic and perceptual ones, and the arena of my desire is moral and metaphoric rather than aesthetic and conceptual.

My works themselves are unexpected. They combine materials that are themselves not ordinarily encountered in galleries in ways still more unconventional. I am hoping to unsettle, but not to discourage. On the contrary, if my intentions are realized, viewers will find themselves strangely drawn to thoughts they will not have expected to find themselves thinking. My work is not difficult in the sense we usually ascribe the word: it is highly accessible and, I hope, enjoyable in a perhaps unusual way: not beautiful but full of things to think and talk about. Its accessibility is based on an explorative surface combined with the titles that provide a symbolic, thematic, or sometimes explicitly historic context and that are meant to offer a starting point for reflection."

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