In 2005 I applied for the Traffic show at Exit Art. While digging through a bunch of loose papers in a box left in my studio by Nick Normal, I came across the lovely gem below. This was the artist's statement that went along with the proposal.

I wrote a transcript of the conversation as best I could remember it. The transcript read like this: "Talk talk. Talk talk. Talk." That was pretty much the whole thing. There were four characters. It was like a short play without a plot. One of the characters talk talk talked all of us under the table. She was talking. I was thinking: if her words are cars, I am standing in the middle of a freeway. So I put it in my notebook. It was number three hundred and fifty four. The only dialogue in the transcript besides talk talk talk, was when someone asked what I was working on. So I lied. The freeway mouth had just occurred to me. I had just written it down. But number three hundred and fifty four looked like a good idea. So I lied. Then the transcript ended after some laugh laugh laughing.

The husband of the talker, the artist, told me what he was working on. He used Fimo©, he said. He said there was an art store in the neighborhood. I went there and bought Sculpey©. The cars were fun to make. I made them in the mornings and put them in parking lots on my work bench. There are thiry five cars on my bench. Soon the rubber latex will come in the mail from Seattle. And in small time I can have a population of thousands of little cars. I work in a very small place. So I make small things. The cars are nice. I will display them as they are, as Cars, Objects #3. The cars will also drive on roads that I build and fall out of mouths that I cast. I am just wondering what conversation looks like. I will use dental alginate to cast the mouths. This would be a fun project to show. They will look like model train sets. One mouth will have a cul-de-sac coming out of it. One a freeway. One a dead end. There are so many possibilities. For now, I am making cars. Next I will cast lips. After that I will build roads and probably have to recast the lips. And then if the other stuff works out, I will have a place to show it.

The lips are made out of plaster and left raw--in contrast to the finished and detailed traffic structures. Also made of plaster are the many painted cars that populate the roads. I want to visualize conversation using the style of model trains. Some people, like my aunt, talk for hours whether or not they have an attentive listener. My aunt talk talk talks like a freeway that ends at a cliff--her words drive and drive, then fall and crash. She's British--so maybe the cliffs are at Dover. When my friend Mary and I get together we tend to talk about ourselves the whole time. Our solipsistic conversations. Our personal cul-de-sacs. Each word spoken circles back to where it came. Each car is a word. Each word has a destination, cargo and speed. Each mouth has a driver and maybe some dependent clauses in the back seat. In the passenger seat sits an adverb, back-seat driving.

I think that is all I have to say for now. The pictures of models are new work. There is some older stuff. The one with all the letters is Exodus. It took about nine months to cast. If you're interested there is a short article of it here. Yep, that's about it, call if you have questions.

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