John crafts luminous, functional light sculptures reminiscent of natural phenomena. Using wood, paper, stone, fabric, metal, and found objects, he creates artworks that lend their unique earthly charms to the spaces they inhabit and brings new awareness to the entanglement of our built world and the organic environment.

Within this modest speck of time I inhabit, I find myself immersed in an inexplicably beautiful and expansive world, an eternity’s worth of lessons before me. I’m thankful for our earth’s stones and am renewed daily by the leaves that rustle outside my window. I’m grateful that the trees chronicle their years so plainly: with rings light in the spring then dark when growth slows. I aim to inherit the craft of pressing their fibers into paper. I’m enamored by the bright iridescent ripples of welded steel and revere gravity, as it dictates the graceful way that fabrics drape. My works emerge from an act of discovery. The zeal of curiosity, a potent spur behind each joint and scribble. By listening and looking, noticing these wonderful peculiarities, I mold my artworks to speak the language of the earth.

—John