danHedges: February 2011

I like the physical nature of building the sculpture–it seems very old-fashioned and traditional. The idea of the material itself–it’s friendly, flexible, there’s a glow from in it. I’m the full-service artist–doing it all at the moment. I like the aspect of the low-tech tools that I need to make something like this. In the beginning [it was] an Xacto knife, masking tape and glue–now it’s the screwgun. So that hasn’t changed much at all–the directness of it, that I could begin to shape this, I can make this very plastic without any special process. There is that sense of one person building this thing–it becomes a “feat”–the whole thing isn’t about that but within the world we live in right now, it makes it a kind of tribal ritual piece; the fact that it was done by the human hand. [That] takes people back to the place in their life where they remember pasting things together [and so] understanding the process.” – Scott Fife

” When I decided I wanted to make art using a gun, I was not sure what direction I would have to take. I knew I did not want to use it simply as an accent to work I was doing, but as the focus. My main goal was to take the destructive power away from the gun. To manipulate the gun into a tool of creation and use it in a way that removed it from its original purpose, to deweaponize it. During my first experiment I came across the concept of creating an image hole by hole on a surface. I also figured out that canvas would be too stressed by the process of a rifle firing many bullets into it. I moved on to aluminum and, with further experimentation, I figured out exactly how far apart my shots needed to be and that moving beyond .22 caliber was simply too destructive. When the aluminum was painted beforehand, the blast of the gun knocked off a tiny amount of paint around each hole, which helped fuse the image together. ” – Walton Creel