For the past ten years my sculpture has employed fragmented, heroic images that are at once playful, yet isolated and mysterious, complex and contradictory. The use of colossuses stemmed from their symbolic reference to order, values, politics and ambitions of a society. Fragmentation of these monumental pieces, the symbolic pillars of the society's strength, reduces them to research specimens. The mute, grand volume and scale are still felt strongly, but their heroic idealization is weakened, revealing the fragility of their grandeur.

In 1990, I was asked by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts to install a sculpture on the grounds of Mellon Park for a one-year period. Normally, I produce sculpture by handbuilding clay and firing it to vitrification in a kiln, but this seemed a good opportunity to experiment with a site-fired sculpture.

My original though for this project was to base the piece on humanity's fragile relationship with the earth. A locally charged reference was to an organization, GASP, which was battling a steel industry that still has coke facilities polluting Pittsburgh's air. A visual reference was to a prehistoric Celtic stone head whose lips are parted, as if drawing breath. The sculpture would be a 16-foot head, rising from the earth like a swimmer coming up for air.

The next step involved building a wooden structure over the adobe face. This created an even larger wooden head. Again the process piqued community interest. "Had the clay head been moved?" Or "Was the wooden mask replacing the clay head?" Visitors to the park had become accustomed to the adobe head and seemed to want it back.

The greatest community response was to firing the wooden mask. It occurred on a clear night in sight of hundreds of passing cars. From the road, the burning mass appeared as a red-glowing head. In the morning, parts of the surface were hardened by firing, other areas had broken away. The head had acquired the quality of a past life.

The next stage was to grow grass and moss on areas of the head to further blend it into the landscape. Eventually, the sculpture will be removed so that only the memory of the process and object will remain.

From the outset, I wanted this project to exemplify the democratic objectives of a public park. "Gasp" could be enjoyed on many levels. A mound of earth, it invited physical participation through kicking, sitting and climbing. It also provided a mental playground for the community, encouraging self-discovery through the changes that occurred.