- I see my work as I'm developing a relationship
with nature
and I'm trying to interact with it
as much as possible.
I want to create something that's beautiful
and profound and inspiring.
It's really about rejoicing in the beauty of nature.
I like to go up to Puget Sound because that region
was glaciated and so you have as many as 30 or 40
different kinds of minerals
that have been dragged from all these different
geologic formations.
The wave action is very gentle and so the stones
tend to keep their angular planes,
but the edges are all rounded.
When you're on a beach that has really great rock
you can look for the most beautiful stones
where every single stone is amazing.
I'm very conscious when I collect rock
to make sure that there's no trace that I've been there.
It's a very low impact,
gentle way of gathering material for my work.
Today I'm building a round medallion mosaic.
I'm using a lot of stone
that I collected on a beach in Puget Sound
but then I'm mixing in a lot of stone that I've gathered
probably over 30 years
from places all over the world,
really special places.
And so, I'm just bringing all that into
this particular mosaic.
'Cause in my garden, I want everything
to be special.
It's a pleasure garden, so you have the sound of water,
you have beautiful things to look at,
like profoundly beautiful things.
You know, if you're gonna build a garden
that's worth aspiring to a really high level,
take it as far up as you can.
I've made a habit of leaving for three to five months
every winter.
And I do it as like I'm going back to school
or something.
I study the cultures, I study the architecture.
One of the most amazing places I've visited
was the Alhambra in Spain.
And it's this incredible palace.
It's considered unsurpassable.
The work that's they did there
has reached such a high pinnacle
that it'll never be done again.
I started traveling when I was in my early 20s.
I saw, in Spain and Portugal,
these amazing mosaic sidewalks and plazas
that were made out of cut stone.
When I see work like that,
I realize that there's this incredibly high level
of accomplishment that you can create something
that's so beautiful that's it's transcendent.
So, I came home and developed a technique
that I still use today.
This is a garden in northwest Portland
near a very popular, busy shopping district.
And, it's a very tiny garden
so I had to maximize on the space
by creating what feels like a room.
And so, the patio became a carpet,
like you would have carpet in a room.
There's a lotus blossom in the center
and that would be the medallion where the spring would be
in a classical Persian garden.
There are 108 of these flowers
expanding out into the universe.
108 is a profound spiritual number
in Buddhist and Hindu numerology.
Because it eludes to the creation of the universe,
after a stressful day,
you can come home and just sit and meditate on it.
It's a metaphor for paradise,
and it's a metaphor for the connection
to the universe.
I got the cover of Landscape Architecture magazine,
several other articles
in Better Homes and Gardens.
Then the New York Times
did an article while I was working on a garden
in Los Angeles.
So, I've had a great deal of recognition.
I think what they really want to know
is how I build these things,
what's the process of building this
so that I can build one myself.
I'm using wet mortar so you have a finite amount of time
that you have to work with it.
And on a hot day, that can be less than half an hour.
So, you have to be really organized
and know exactly what you're doing.
I'm just picking out stones
that I think are beautiful
and that have an interesting shape
and so I can go around and look for a spot
that this might fit.
You'll even hear little scraping sound
where they're like going together
and you know that they're touching really tight
and that's a tight fit.
It's kind of like making a collage
but I'm incorporating all the different colors
and dispersing them through the mosaic.
Right now I'm filling in all the tight spaces in here
and I'm trying to make this really feel like a sunburst.
So, I've been looking for linear rocks
that are long and thin
they kind of convey that spray.
And so, this is sort of like making the sun,
essentially, it's like an energy burst.
And so, I can get them all placed the way I want them
and then I take a sheet of plywood
and then I just stomp on it
and what I'm doing
is pressing all of the pebbles so they're perfectly flat
in a plane.
So, when I left the board off, there's this excess mortar
that's bee pushed up
and I hose that off.
I was commissioned to do a major project
up in Washington, in Puget Sound.
It's a walking labyrinth.
It took me about 3 1/2 months to build the mosaic
and I gathered probably 10,000 pounds of stone.
The inner nine circuits of the labyrinth
represent the nine planets
and then the center is the sun.
You turn at the cardinal points,
north, south and east and west
and so that creates four quadrants
and so those represent the four seasons.
And there's a prayer wheel on the property
which is a Tibetan wheel that you turn
and it rings a bell.
When somebody would ring the prayer wheel,
I would make a little flower or a symbol
in the mosaic work I was working to capture
that moment and that intention
and make it special.
So, there's 100s of these things
as I built it.
And then sometimes they would say
can you make it for my won who died
or you know, I was diagnosed with cancer
or my dog died.
There's births and deaths.
It goes through the full cycle of life.
It was really an honor to build this,
to be commissioned to build something
with such a high intention.
I think there's a lot of power and beauty.
The thing that I would really like
that I hope is that other people
will be inspired to create beauty as well
and the world will become more beautiful
because other people are doing it too.
I want create things that are really beautiful,
profoundly beautiful because the world needs
as much beauty as it can get.