About Sam

My Intention is to make beauty surrounded by concept

In lieu of rending and sculpting the body parts, I prefer to adopt ready-made and easily available doll parts. By mixing scale, or cutting and combining parts, I can fabricate and abstract the human form. I connect the parts together, fill and smooth the joints, and create forms that are believable, but completely wrong. Because we are all so familiar of how humans look, ones brain instantly recognizes my forms as familiar, despite the proportions and placement of limbs being highly irregular. I eschew stands or pedestals; I prefer my pieces to stand on their own, just like we do.

Any time one look at another person, we create a narrative about them based on all the available information, layered with our innate biases. We often instantly determine if they are friend or foe, or of they are appealing to us. We create a story in our mind, because we are regarding another member of our tribe, and that’s what we do. Always. Typically one brings this same skill when viewing my pieces.  Because of our inate ability to judge one another, people are typically either delighted or perhaps a bit creeped out by my work, sometimes both at the same time.

I think and work

in three dimensions. My brains are in my hands, and my vision and imagination is expressed through my fingertips. Rather than research through sketches and working out details in advance, I prefer to work directly with the materials.

The important thing in my mind is not to say no, but to allow any absurdity to take place; to move fluidly from piece to piece with accumulated knowledge learned from the previous exploration. I want to allow this to expression to flow, so the ideas are not hampered by technique or self doubt.

I also create jewelry. Visit my jewelry website here: shawjewelry.com

I also create architectural follies and buildings. See a short video here: