ARTIST STATEMENT EXTRAS (2005, Galvanized welded metal) While at the theater, or while watching a movie I noticed that I began to pay more attention to characters present in the background than the characters that actually told the story. Theirs was a life that you could really never know and were never really meant to know but existed all the same. I decided to look at my own life to discover what characters played a more or less hidden role. This was easily and quickly done. The extras on my list were all women, partly because as a man I think it is fairly obvious that women will always remain a bit of a mystery to me. This was also due to the nature of past relationships I have had with women and their tendency to move from a leading character to a barely recognizable and largely over looked figure in the distance. This introduced an unplanned social comment to the work. My working methods have more in common with construction then traditional sculpture. But this is a bit of a misleading statement as I obviously use no blue prints or plans of any kind. Sometimes I know the nature of a character before completion, others only on completion and still others changed and changed again. I worked to capture specific random physical gestures in steel, at times allowing the sculpture to build itself. I had no wish to overly direct or debate the work, as this would have been contrary to the unknowable nature of the characters being created. Wesley Rickert Spring 2005