For a brief time in a child’s development, around the ages five to seven, there is a certain power in their drawings – at least this is what I observed in my own two children and their friends. I see this power as a combination of their awkwardness and struggle and their immediacy, spontaneity, and flow.

When my son Louis’s kindergarten class came to my studio to see my Security Blankets, they drew “things that belong in the sky.” Many of their drawings found their way into Night Sky and A Mouthful of Stones as shapes and also, much enlarged, as ink wall drawings in the installation A Bed is a Boat. The boat shape in Adam’s Boat was drawn by my second son Adam, as were the cradle/moon shapes in Cradle and Lullaby and the sleeping figure in Little Prince asleep on his planet.

It was only after completing the commissioned work Cradle (2000) that it occurred to me that the wall drawings could translate into water-cut steel. I love the way these  “drawings” in steel occupy a space that is both drawing and sculpture and the way that the steel gives real weight to the casual sweep of the drawings.

Family, Louis’s 1991drawing of our smiling family members in a house, which I perched on the edge of a cliff (another child-drawn shape), has become our official family portrait.

Your Heart is both icon and organ.