"Growing up in Charleston impoverished and neglected, surrounded by flaking plaster, mortarless walls, old tiles and rotting wood, I saw them as delight rather than decay. 

 

Ever since, I have carried on a love affair with fragments, shards, ruins, bits of civilizations.  This is not simply nostalgia.  A large part of it is visual-tactile pleasure derived from color, broken edges, worn surfaces produced by time and weather.  The enigmatic quality of things not quite complete, the mystery of symbols not entirely understood. "