Since being here at Carnegie Mellon University I've been working large scale, anywhere between four feet to eight feet, mostly by sculpting the object solid and making plaster molds from it into which I pack clay. The big hand presently in my studio came from a project in which I was invited to exhibit in Erie, Pennsylvania and is called "Monument to Four - Hundred - and - Ninety - Seven Americans Who Lost Their Lives to Handguns in One Week." On the back of it is stamped all the names of the people who were killed. It was placed in front of the emergency room at a hospital.

Many of my pieces revolve around political issues in which I am interested. I feel that if you have a single image like a big hand then it's a way of impacting the viewer differently than by the rhetoric they see somewhere else in a newspaper or magazine. The big lips are a tribute to Cambodian artists going back to Cambodia to be artists, a brave thing, and the image is taken from an ancient site in Cambodia. The eyes are titled "An Eye for an Eye," about the senseless wars that go on and on taking an eye for an eye. I'm doing research on land mines right now, but I haven't quite come up with a piece about that yet.

My most recent piece is called "Collateral Damage." It plays off the terminology which our government uses to ignore the fact that when we're bombing we kill civilians. It has benches that are meant to invite people to sit down and think about what they're looking at and what it means.

Carnegie Mellon is an academic environment rich in hi-tech with connections to robotics. But I want people to sit down and take a moment to think about what the benches are doing and what the objects on the benches represent.

I'm working with different sizes of Pearlite in the clay to give it a coarse texture so it can look like clay or like tofu stone. The Pearlite lightens the clay but doesn't seem to weaken it. At Cone 8 it burns out and leaves a little coating behind. I had to come up with a clay body that would not only withstand heat but freezing as well, with under 1% absorption. The work is for a building on the campus and deals with a cross section of the campus. I took real people and asked them what they would like to be pictured doing, and took casts of their hands and made objects to fit into those hands. It included the president of the university, faculty, staff, a gardener, students, even the architect of the building.