UV: Who or what are your biggest influences?
CW: Numerous artists: Constatin Brancusi, Martin Puryear, Tom Friedman, Kurt Schwitters, Joseph Cornell, Hannah Hoch, Alison Saar, William H. Johnson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Art Chantry, to name the most compelling.

UV: Describe your relationship to your medium.
CW: I am a pack rat by nature. Thankfully, for the most part, I collect old paper ephemera and small objects. With "Ocean Framed," however, I drew upon my large collection of old, cheap/ damaged/ discarded atlas globes. I prefer materials that have a sense of history. I love old color printing methods and materials from the turn of the century up to about the fifties. The muted colors and weathered objects are ripe for my reinterpretation: reconstructing something completely new which hints, sometimes very subtly, at the original incarnation of the object.

UV: How often do you make work?
CW: I am constantly working, though the fine art work has only recently, once again, become frequent. I am currently doing a lot of computer graphics and graphic design; a new love of mine. I am very interested in making work that eventually will bleed between my computer graphic sensibilites and the tangible, 3-dimensional world of my preferred materials. At the present, I haven't quite figured that out without the works looking completely hackneyed and pretentious.

UV: Tell us about your method.
CW: The particular series that this piece is a part of has engaged me for about six years and involves, primarily, but not exclusively, atlas globes. Initially, the work was about the form and a meditation on the sphere, circle, etc. It soon became, however, difficult to look past the inherent connotations. As I continue to work on the series in the present, the intention of the series has bifurcated into a complex, sticky fusion of both of those ideas. However, new pieces taking shape right now are, once again, more focused on the form and all the variations I find visually and intellectually rich. The biggest influences right now are the works of contemporary sculptor Martin Puryear, and also the modernist works of Constatin Brancusi and Jean Arp.

UV: Does anything limit your art?
CW: The most recent limitation to surface in my work is my continued politeness and reverence for my materials. While that quality is not always a negative, I struggle with it. It creates a relationship bordering on fawning and preciousness that I really want to address more actively and physically in the final form. Somehow, I want to strike an interesting balance between a raw/brutal state and a refined elegance.