TEACHING STATEMENT Great art arises at the intersection of technique and idea, form and content, the material and ethereal. Great artists are makers who regularly traverse these seeming dichotomies as they weave together ancient and new techniques to explore our shared human experiences. My teaching seeks to embrace and expand these fundamental truths. Every society and every age has its makers, and I help to prepare makers for our future. In both my art and my teaching, I am a hybrid of ancient and future times, moving from striking a hammer onto a piece of metal to modeling surface treatments on a computer. I am a teacher of history, technology, craft, design, and technique. I am also a teacher of students, helping them know their past and eagerly and fearlessly create their futures. I teach at the intersection of confidence and content.

Students need the content, the knowledge to safely smith, cast, fabricate, and construct artifacts in
a variety of materials such as copper, bronze, and silver. These historic materials, techniques, and skills are the center of my curriculum, and are fused to newer and emerging ones, such as plastics and resins, aluminum anodizing, electroforming, and 3D printing. My students will experience some tools and techniques 10,000 years old, and others 10 years old; and they might use both old and new in the same piece. These tools and techniques come from all across the world, spanning the full range of human art and culture. With them, students learn how objects have been made and used to communicate status, social role, or ritual power. My teaching helps students move from analyzing archetypical or metaphorical forms to making objects with 21st century relevance and impact. As a primarily undergraduate teacher, I help new learners design and make things of which they often don't believe they can, helping them integrate sequential and logical thinking with creative approaches to problem solving. They learn to choose design and technical strategies appropriate
to their goals, and then experience the intellectual reward of making a complex object - from idea
to finished artwork - using tools and techniques unknown to them just a short while ago. I want students to learn that they are capable of great things.