I began gilding, as I suppose most people do, working on furniture and other man-made objects. 

 

Several years ago, a friend in the Bahamas showed me a gray, pitted, decaying, algae-encrusted sperm whale vertebra.  It was a disturbing object on one level, but on another it resonated with my scientific background.  As a biologist, I had always viewed the inner workings and structures of organisms as fascinating and beautiful in their complexity and shapes.  Suddenly, I made the connection that gilding an object that most people associate with death and decay could help others see the beauty I have always seen in biological structures.

 

Throughout my education in biology, in addition to wonder, I always felt gratitude to the creatures I dissected, whose inner structures I had the privilege to discover.  I feel the same way when I gild the bones of a whale.  I think of one whale in particular, who sadly died offshore and washed onto the beach near where I live.  When the micro-organisms, sun, and salt air had done their work and scrubbed the flesh off the bones, a friend brought me one of the vertebrae to gild.  With every centimeter of bone surface that I explored and covered with gold, I thought of that whale, who had probably never been touched by a human; I reflected humbly on its life in the ocean, and I thanked it for allowing me to touch it in an effort to bring it in some tiny way back to life.

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My greatest happiness in making art is taking objects that most people view with fear or disgust and transforming them into objects that fascinate and call out to be touched