Saint Frisbee
St Frisbee is the patron saint of quarantine and calm, focus and patience. No matter what’s happening his concentration is unwavering, and his endurance legendary. These carved tree trunk figures of St Frisbee explore play and focus under pressure. I have truly loved the process of finding each figure within a unique tree trunk. And I love their interplay of form and surface. and the way each figure finds a way to bridge the mundane and the transcendent.
My project for the last year has been to develop tree carvings of a figure I call St Frisbee. During the pandemic, I made a small sketch so different from the hundred other drawings made during quarantine that it came to occupy a special place in my brain and heart. A seated well-dressed middle-aged man calmly catches a frisbee while sheltering a nervous puppy beside him. This fictional self-portrait style drawing stood out for its positivity, lightness of hand, and strange specificity of its portrayal. Fast forward to last winter, when during a bout of Covid my mind drifted back to this mysteriously benevolent character, and I began to draw him envisioning him as a sort of saint of concentration and calm, with his eyes glued to the descending disc of the frisbee.