Wicked Witch of the Midwest, 2018

Cast bronze, wood, printed mylar balloon with helium and ribbon

74″ x 60″ x 32″

$1250

In the Fall of 2018, four years after moving back to Omaha, I had a two-person exhibition at the Fred Simon Gallery, in the offices of the Nebraska Arts Council, with the painter Katie B. Temple. Katie’s subjects are houses and the emotional baggage they contain. For me, the notion of “home” is not unfamiliar ground sculpturally, so I took the show as a motivation to make a few new sculptures on that theme, my first sculptures in 12 years. This one is three things: it is signage for the exhibition, since we ended up calling the show “Welcome Home;” it is a marker for my return to Sculpture, my first love; and it is an expression of my ambivalence about coming home to the Midwest.