Taijitu

The wood sculptures were the first works produced of this series. Looking back at them in retrospect it is clear that one of the most common themes in my work is the circle and sphere. The base of the Pearl and Taijitu were created by setting 30x20 inch cherry tree logs onto a standard cabinet lazy suzanne and then spinning them by using a large electric hand drill. The drill was held in a vice, and a wood spade bit in the drill was forced into the log, then the drill was turned on. I used a chainsaw to rough shape the log into a semi-sphere, and a block plane to smooth it out while it was spinning. You never seen so many shavings spin out of hand plane! Needless to say that it didn't take to long before the poor lazy suzanne was burned out, but she got the job done.

I purchased my first lathe in 1994 and a whole world of round potentiality opened up to me. I now have hundreds of 'objects' in my sketch books which could form an indefinite flow of experiments in metal, glass, and wood. Working on a larger scale is something else I would like to address some day.

The Taijitu (Wade-Gilest'ai4 chi2 t'u2 Pinyin taìjítú) 太極圖, diagram of the supreme ultimate, is a well known symbol deriving from Chinese Culture which represents the principle of yin-yang fromToaist and Neo-Confucian philosophy. The term Taijitu itself refers to any of several schematic diagrams representing these principles.

Tai - pronounce it like "Tai"wan
pronounce it like you sing the note from high to low
Ji - pronounce it like "G"
this "G" must pronounce like singing low note to high note
Tu - pronounce it like "to"
low note to high note also.