Our modern cultural obsession with the mental and technological, with ‘progress’ and ‘achievement’, is responsible for our digression from the heart and away from each other.  Obsessed with growth we deny decay, with success we disregard failure, with being we deny mortality, with production we undervalue idleness. Having been removed from the environment, and thwarted from directly fulfilling my essential needs as a feature (and strategy) of industrialized society, everything I make is an experience in understanding my existence in terms of our culture.  Not having known psychic integration because of this existence as commodity, my work is also an attempt to mend the psychic schism created by the disconnect between necessity and labor.  The forms are a result of the making process as much as the record of the meditation of activity and existence. Like a signature, the product ‘signifies’ my absence/mortality, as well as my existence/corporeality.  It is my intention that the pieces are true to process, with sparse evidence of the maker, and draw the viewer into a state of contemplation.

-Eric Petersen