Most of my career I've been interested in the difference between 2d, and 3d art work, the suggested space of drawing/painting vs. the real, occupied space of sculpture. For me this is a metaphor for our time...the inference of experience vs. being part of actual, physical experience. I've always loved to draw and I've always made things. Both ways of working began with printed images or photographs. My drawings generally were of objects I photographed, things that were man made that struck me as odd and interesting in some way. These early drawings, though similar in source and concept to my sculpture did not relate as closely to my sculpture as I wanted. I had believed that my drawing, a very different activity from making sculpture, was of equal importance. My sculpture had its roots in 2 dimensional imagery, magazine, photos etc that I translated into constructed objects. The drawings, though having a similar source, were on the other hand more direct, spontaneous and arrived at in a way very different from the planning and construction of a piece of sculpture. I wanted to take these two different ways of making art and combine them in a single object. Some of my drawings remain as drawings; stand alone, while other drawings demand a 3 dimensional quality. In these combination sculpturedrawings I'm continuing to look at the possibilities of working these two disparate ideas into one.

-James Patrick Finnegan