#john duff

Wanting to make a particular piece is to be caught up in solving problems about how to make it. Form and material are interdependent: they can combine to make something greater than either alone; they can interact structurally to create a greater sense of meaning. Process is a direct outgrowth of the character of form. The idea is an arbitrary starting point, but certain formal and structural necessities follow to give a work coherence. I start with the gross level of a material: the more you perceive and act on the infinite subtleties of that material and its properties, the more powerful a work will be.

The work can lead you in directions beyond your mechanical imagination. It's like any relationship: you do something, the work asserts an identity, and you either resist or follow. I think you have to follow what a piece suggests, its energies that rise and build.

The ego wants to control and understand a work in a linear way. An artist has to be willing to jump into unknown, uncomfortable territory in the work. You have to kick over intellectual assumptions until you are working at a point where you don't know if a piece will succeed or fail and don't care.

My image is one of continually falling forward into the piece. Every time I do something, I want to feel something new structurally, conceptually and physically.

You can't disallow feelings because you don't understand them. You have to have faith that everything is connected. An impulse that excites or repels you is really energy to contend with. Facing those impulses is the only way to break out of stasis, the closed circle. Your little circle of knowledge is not the limit of knowledge. At some point, new information has to come in to allow growth beyond the circle. Otherwise, you'll do the same thing over and over.

Vasari said to imitate nature and its manner of operation. A lot of what I do comes from a literal mode of workman-like necessity. Taking nature as a model, every part is necessary: the way a tree functions with its roots in the ground, its trunk transmitting nutrients, and its leaves collecting sunlight. Anything not structurally coherent is discarded. I try to put that level of being into my work rather than a level of aesthetic design.

Good artists and good art have always been about the nature of being, the principles that underlie life. My focus is to be attentive. Part of that is being attentive to the state of being attentive. This relates to a level of perception of the world; the more subtly you perceive nature and the world, the more deeply and subtly you are connected to it and can act on it. One's art reflects that. The deeper the connection is, the more universal the connections become.

The sculpture is proof that one's thoughts and feelings are real. What interests me, making the work, resides in the work for others to see. The self is grounded in perception and makes work out of that perception. It's knowledge you acquire, expand and manipulate. As thinking grows, the work grows as a reflection of thought. Artists use the work to grow, and in every work you are experimenting and finding out something about the world and feeling. If you've really done that, it's there for somebody else, too. It people aren't touched, you haven't done that. The quality of somebody's perception matters. You never know who is experiencing the work."