You title your body of work "An Instinct Toward Life" (and detail), and in those artworks you deal with experiences of trauma and loss, but also the endurance of the human spirit. Can you talk a bit about how you went about embedding those experiences in these works?

I am a big believer in using the actual materials of war when trying to address such a difficult topic. Referencing just doesn't cut it for me. So there is a literal embodiment, at a material level, of the very substances that caused the trauma or loss but also the redemption. Things like excavated bullet lead, that more than likely caused a wound, but also things like lockets of hair that would be braided into elaborate "hair flowers" or mourning jewelry, that were efforts by the families of the lost to somehow mourn, and, most importantly, remember the loved one. Beyond the materials, the historical stories I made sculptural responses to were ones that reflected this spirit of survival and endurance. Stories often forgotten about in the larger narratives of war. Things like how a whole generation of men in the Civil War, who had just experienced an unprecedented level of war related amputations, would respond to the simple act of wanting to walk your daughter down the wedding aisle. How they did respond, and pointing the spotlight on moments like that, embody an important part of remembering the war as much as any statistic will reveal.

What drew you to this topic, and these materials-Civil War prosthetics, human bones, glass eyes, medical implements, war-related ribbons and photographs, and the like?

After 9/11 my work made a drastic shift in focus. Everyone remembers the question in the immediate aftermath was "why?" As an artist I had to ask some serious questions about what the role of the artist and art was in a moment like this. Could art say anything meaningful in the face of such tragedy? Of course [Arthur] Danto gave this point a new kind of urgency in the face of the Holocaust but I needed to know for myself and if anything had changed since that horrible moment. I decided that I would not look away from the problem until I felt I had got somewhere. I had no idea that over 10 years later, and several dozens of works, I would still be clawing away at it. Of course, now I realize probably nothing less than a lifetime should be devoted to such questions. One of the handful of points I feel I understand better is that if you are going to talk about war in any serious and respectful way I feel you cannot blink or look away from the actual realities of the battlefield. And one of those realities is that the destruction of the body and the mind can be so devastatingly complete that only dust is left. No other solution seemed right except to account for that dust as an actual material in the work. There can be the hope that the poetic can act as some sort of balm to the wounds of war, but when it came to selecting materials I felt there was no hope for emotional honesty unless you use the actual materials of war.