California
After I came back from California these were the kinds of things I was making, these boxes with gaps and some of them had oozes coming out of the gaps. It didn't relate to anything in particular that I'd seen in California but I had just seen so much that wasn't wheel thrown that it opened up a lot for me.

Funk Art
When I first started graduate school I was floating all over the place and I was making those hard edged things with the oozes. At the same time I was very influenced by all the funk art going on around me. So every so often I would take time off from the hard edged serious work for a little fun at funk art, what I thought. The shoes were an attempt to be funky. I made a whole series of shoes of which these were the only pair that had something going for them, really, you know, visually, at the end. So I broke all the others but these ones sort of had a nice flow.

Boots 1
What happened was one of the other graduate students had a boyfriend who was a poet who looked at my shoes and said 'would you like to see my boots?' He had been working in a foundry and so he had these boots that were all worn. You know steeltoe boots where the toes were torn open, you could see the steel and they were crusty and everything. It was at that point I realized what I could do with a pair of boots, the type of story they told, the type of history they carried with them.

Boots2
It was the first time I really went to town to create something on the surface rather than just the form. Before that the pieces, even though I was trying to be funky, I was mostly interested in the form. With these the surface was also suddenly very important, the stitch marks, the cracks, and what not. So this is really a crystallization piece in a way. It's the piece that started me on the trend to what I spent the next many years aiming for.

Jacket
Jackets are difficult to make because they're hard to structure, hard to be methodical about them. Suitcases I can be methodical and put in the proper structure but jackets because of the way they drape it's much more difficult to make them drape convincingly.

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