Artist Statement

I was trained as a weaver before I was a sculptor. My father, Boris Kaplunovich, wove monumental tapestries all his life, and at the academy in Vitebsk I studied tapestry, textile, and ornament before metal ever entered my hands. I left the loom for the foundry, but the loom never left me. Everything I have made since is weaving carried into other materials: drawings filled with lace and ornament, ink narratives running in horizontal registers like rows on a loom, panels pieced from patinated metals and stitched with nail seams, openwork bronze, hanging works whose strands are a warp and whose weft is light itself. Artists from El Anatsui to Ruth Asawa have made metal behave like cloth. I work in the opposite direction, carrying the weaver's logic into solid bronze and steel. I changed materials. I never stopped weaving.

I grew up in Kherson, in a house full of talk about art. From early on I was looking, reading the shape of things, finding images in them. I collected stones then and I collect them still; they enter the sculpture now as they entered my looking then. Only later, when I came to cave painting, did I understand I had been working by this principle all along without naming it.

I work from the premise that an image is not imposed on a surface but discovered within it. The earliest image-makers read the contours of stone and freed the forms already waiting in the wall. That latency still guides me. I do not believe in accidents. What looks like chance, a texture, a spill of molten bronze, a shadow cast by ink, carries its own logic, formed by material, time, and process. I bring vision and authorship, yet the work exceeds my intention. The same surface shows different images to different viewers; that is what happens when a surface is built with enough density to hold more than one reading.

The weaving and the reading are one act. A tapestry is built thread by thread, and no single thread carries the image; the image rises from the accumulation. I work the same way in every medium. In drawing, lines are pressed into being, incised with a pressure close to carving, ornament interlacing until figures surface from the weave. In relief, torch in hand, I melt stainless steel directly, weld bronze and copper into it, and the metals knot together the way threads knot on a loom. No surface can be repeated. Through patination and selective polishing, light moves across the work the way it moves across ancient stone. Some works stay contained within their grounds; others hang off the wall, and light passing through their openings weaves a second image in shadow, one fixed, one fugitive.

I work with line in space. Three decades of foundry discipline give that line structural weight, while the habit of drawing resists the inertia of mass. Each medium sharpens the other by correcting what the other, left alone, would become.

In two dimensions or three, my task is to protect the life within the material: to see where it gathers and bring it to rest without extinguishing it. The viewer who glances will find something. The viewer who stays will find more. The work asks for time, because if you look again, you will see more.