CHORUS
This section of my website attempts to explain the correlation between frogs and my art.
After returning from a collecting trip to Guatemala with a group of highly respected herpetologists where we preserved reptile and amphibian specimens for scientific study, I found myself drawn to working with living amphibians. Frog populations are currently diminishing from the erosion of their habitat. In Guatemala the once clear rivers have been silted in from slash and burn subsistence farming. Over population in the human community is undoubtedly having its effect on amphibians. The frogs from higher elevations appear to be dying from a Chytrid fungus. Entire populations of frogs have disappeared from still undetermined causes.
Were natural history collections, like we were accumulating in Guatemala available to study these frog populations for the past one hundred years, we would have a much clearer understanding of this amphibian decline. But without those collections scientists are scrambling to try and understand these mass extinctions before all the frogs are lost.
I've always felt some urgency in making art. The pressure of an impending exhibition is exhilarating. The process of funneling accumulated elements through an aesthetic and content driven sieve requires some sense of urgency. Creating enclosures for animals whose environmental requirements are so specialized that they can not survive in our environment, requires a similar sense of urgency.
Research into captive populations of amphibians led me to Amphibia, Order Anura, and Family Denrobatidae, the poison frogs from Central and South America. I would have preferred working with salamanders, but the urgency was not there. Order Caudata (salamanders) had not (at that time) entered the rapid decline of their Anuran cousins. Plus and primarily because I found a cohesive collection of people already raising "poison dart frogs" in captivity I decided to raise these colorful little frogs.
For the past twenty years my work has examined what we find precious enough to preserve. I have dug through root cellars and libraries to find material to fuel my curiosity and transform into Art. For ten plus years I gleaned discarded objects from a field beside my studio in downtown Dallas.
My curiosity was picked one day when, while walking my old dog through this field, I found a china doll leg. Seven years and several thousand objects later I first showed Freedmen's Field. It is composed of the remnants of a settlement of freed black men and their descendants who occupied that land from the 1860's to the 1960's.
A couple of weeks ago while I was training my new assistant Cooper to care for the frogs, seemingly out of the blue, she asked if sometime she'd come in to find that I had pickled all these frogs to use in my art work. My immediate response was shock not that she would ask, but at the repulsiveness of the question. I was training her to care for these frogs. Basically imploring her to treat them as fragile little lives endangered by their vulnerability to the environment outside their protective enclosures. While I'm away their lives are completely dependent on her care. Looking back at my work and experience her question was appropriate. Perhaps I should assure you all as I did Cooper that the lives of these frogs are paramount. Their images have and will appear in my work, and eventually some living frogs may be included in some installation pieces. I have pulled molds of frogs lost to bad shipping. And I have little to no reservations about pulling molds from frogs that have died naturally but I will not kill any of these frogs to use them in my work.
It was hard for me to justify killing so many animals in Guatemala. I was raised a hunter. I got my first black eye at six years old shooting my dad's 12 gauge at a tin can down by some river. And I was damned proud of it. 
I raised chickens as a child whose necks I'd wring and pluck for Saturday dinner. Sunday was pot roast. The idea of consuming animals was in my roots, but killing for scientific knowledge was something I had to justify to be able to handle. My job, as I saw it, was to learn about the preservation aspects of this natural history collection process and then to communicate something from the material aspects of the trip to conceptual aspects of the experience on into a large-scale installation.
I was careful not to impugn the honor of my host during the two-month trip.
He held my respect and still does. The process and concept behind collecting the bodies of animals we encountered alive was not too hard to digest. After all they constitute a living record of life forms that are inevitably in the process of change. If natural history collections like these existed from a thousand years ago we might better understand the changes that are currently happening. But they don't, and we are in a quandary to try and understand this rapidly evolving environment taking place all around us today. I was able to engage the hunter in my roots to euthanize the animals we collected.
Euthanizing the animals bothered me more as I tried to correlate the experiences into the installation. In 
the initial body of work it was not a problem for me. I presented the experience directly and honestly. The problems arose from other people's interpretations. I was not allowed to show the original body of work and had to make a second interpretation that excluded direct reference to the animals we collected. The process of rebuilding the installation caused me physical harm in fact it almost took my life. I have learned from this experience and will continue to learn from it.
I learned a great deal from the herpetologist I accompanied to Guatemala. Not so much about the herpetology he knows and teaches so well, but a wealth about the emotional toll of collecting from an environment spent by human neglect and abuse. I have heard arguments repeatedly inferring the decay in our natural environment including the amphibian decline may result from some natural evolutionary process. Animals go extinct as they have through out the evolutionary record. But when you look directly at the changes in the environment that have taken place in the fifty plus years of my lifetime the effects of human indifference and misconception on this planet are horrifying. Justifying the use of pickled animals as reference to this horrific loss is easily possible for me, but killing animals whose lives offer me more and greater lessons to make horrific statements about loss is counter productive.
My job is to learn from these fragile little animals and then to communicate what I can in various aesthetic ways to a world that is ignoring itself.
