The majority of my sculptures are kinetic and are built to animate mental processes. Some represent the basic neural functions others focus on psychology. I try to keep my work accessible to a wide audience by balancing the formal aesthetics of sculpture with my concepts and ideas.

I often start a sculpture with an item to which I have given a symbolic meaning. That meaning gets associated with a human activity or motion and that motion is what gets translated into a sculpture. At least that’s what is supposed to happen. The laws of physics, friends and colleagues often have better ideas. For example, Narcissus was meant to be a drawing machine, but after several discussions with myself and a few friends, a human figure appeared. For some reason, the little person was supposed to be scrubbed by a cleaning brush until finally, the mirror idea popped up and gave the sculpture its name. I am still working on the drawing machine.

My approach to aesthetics is to make the work accessible in some way to more than the avant-garde, trained artist. I am still influenced by something my graduate school physics teacher said, “I like the copper part of this, but I don’t care about what you said it means. I don’t see that.” She was looking at The Water Closet. I respect that comment as a reflection of what the non-artist public might see. I don’t always succeed at this, and have made several sculptures that require a verbal or written explanation. Initially I used inanimate objects to represent the human form. In a series of work that uses water as a metaphor for enlightenment, knowledge or wisdom. I used elements of found objects or made objects to mimic the human form. For instance, Mechanical Drinking Man tries to suck water out of his hand, a damp vacuum cleaner brush that it rapidly slaps into a trough. His head is another piece of a vacuum cleaner, the orifice mimicking a human mouth. The sculpture was more successful in its mock-up version with rough castings of a human face and hand when the air and water were constantly being sucked into an open mouth. The Sculpture, Progress, is made with carved walnut heads, and although it may be cryptic to those not tuned into “Graham’s world”, it is at least accessible through recognizable form and action.

Recently I completed my first public commission for a theatre restaurant that involved making four life-sized human figures out of fiberglass. I used the income from that commission to travel to Europe and see first hand what I have only seen in slides, and books. I am inspired to make large scale bronze sculptures that use human form and mechanical animation.

Being an artist and teaching sculpture are beneficial to each other. Teaching keeps my perspective as a sculptor in check because everyday I have to answer the same questions: “What do you make?” “What are you working on now?” and “Are you working on anything right now?” I am not a good liar, and the questions keep me motivated to work.