Several years ago I got the idea of using local granite to hand carve bathroom lavatories for the house I was building with my wife, writer Susan J. Tweit. My intention was to use local rocks - treated as found objects, not as raw material - and bring them into the house as ambassadors of the Earth. I eventually figured out how to do the necessary carving and polishing and plumbing and mounting, and I acquired the needed tools and skills. In the process I fell in love, or I found the desire to give expression to terraphilia.

First I was struck by the pure form of what I was doing. A rock is basically a convex object, and I was intervening by introducing a big concavity that I was taking pains to shape in a particular way. I've since read Henry Moore on holes, and recognized my own excitement in his words. Then I polished a vessel and was struck by the juxtaposition of my highly refined intervention and the raw natural material of the rock. I mounted another granite vessel on industrial materials - galvanized steel - and I was struck by that contrast. I formed a steel band to support a different basin and I had it nickel plated, mounting the raw stone in a shiny bezel. I carved a long oval basin and mounted the faucet at one end and the drain at the other; to wash your hands in that basin is to put your hands in a horizontal stream that's pulled by gravity before your eyes. Practically everything I try leads me to explore something else.

Now, after a very different career as an academic economist and expert witness, I'm hooked. I'm making other functional objects as well as sculpture with no pretense of functionality. I incorporate rocks as ambassadors of the Earth, and hope that living with them will be a transformative experience, leading others to engage terraphilia as I did.