I wanted to put my body into my work.
I wanted to put my own experiences into my work.
And this was, as a student,
this was at a time I just stopped
competing as an athlete.
So the experiences I had
which had been most profound
were on the football field.
You know, I started playing young enough
that my whole adolescence was spent in that place.
I loved the the process of preparation and feeling like
potential energy was at its greatest at that moment
that the game would begin
and as soon as the game would begin,
it all would be blown,
spent.
Well, I think as an athlete
you understand that your
body requires resistance in order to grow.
It's something you take for granted
and the whole training process is built upon that understanding.
I looked at those experiences
and tried to draw them into what I was making in the studio
and started using my body that way in creating situations
that put some sort of a resistance against my body.
I started using prosthetic grade plastics.
I think as a way of referring
to the protective equipment that surrounded me
as a football player
and a way of building the architecture of the body
inward and outward.
And of course, you know,
Vaseline petroleum jelly is a lubricant
and something that was just a present all the time,
in the training room.
There was always petroleum jelly.
There was always the mentholated drawing jelly
that they would put on the roof of your mouth
if you were, you had cotton mouth, you know,
put on your ankles before they would tape them,
there was always this sort of layer of lubricant.
You know, making objects as a student
and you know, being repelled by how dry they were,
I'm just wanting to moisten them.
When you're on the field and you're playing,
you're seeing across the field
and you know, locating, you know,
holes in the defense from the ground perspective,
but you're taught all of the plays in plan
and you're forced to study your performance and plan
so there's a way in which that you experience
what's happening in plan
although it's not what you're seeing.
There's an interesting out-of-body experience that's happening there
that I think always interested me.
I started drawing the field emblem around the time,
drawing restraint one was made
and get the time I was interested in expressing this duality
between an aerial plan of an arena
where these activities could take place.
And a flat graphic representation
of the drawing restraint concept,
the body with a self-imposed resistance,
as, you know, as an enabler of creative act.
Again, I think that had to do with my habits
as an athlete
and you know how I was accustomed
to dealing with my body at that point.
