Clay. It wasn’t until after my father died that I realized the enormous impact he had had on my work. His aesthetic sensibility ran throughout our lives: from the furniture we sat on to the everyday ceramic pots we ate from. From the choice of where our house was—secluded, set into the woods, in the city, yet separate from it, always surrounded by the natural environment—down to the stoneware glazes that he used, all natural earth colors.

But it’s the simplest things that can be overlooked. Looking down at him after he had died, I noticed his hands. His hands were so delicate, beautiful. I realized he had given me his hands. With those hands came his skill at working with clay, pulling pots out of the clay, pots as long as his arm. Perhaps it never occurred to me how his life as a potter would exert such a strong influence on my work since I failed utterly at trying to throw a pot; I couldn’t center that ball of clay no matter how I tried.

After school, my brother and I would walk over to our father’s studio and spend countless hours watching as our father kneaded the clay, pounding it, pushing it, cutting it through the wire; he worked with it effortlessly as a fluid, plastic medium, where he could pull up a form, then with one touch open or close the shape.

It struck me then that my architecture models started in clay and my earliest metalsmithing started in wax. Plastic mediums that had to be sculpted, molded, and shaped.

It never occurred to me that my professors at Yale thought I was being eccentric when I produced a building out of plasticine and painted it glossy black. I called it cut basalt—cut, faceted, and impossible to build since it was generated from a completely organic, hand-shaped method.

Or that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was first brought to shape in mashed potatoes at the dining hall. So many of my projects are worked out in plasticine. Plasticine is a clay material in which oil is the medium that keeps the clay permanently plastic and fluid. It is like the earth; my affinity has always been toward sculpting the earth. This impulse has shaped my entire body of work.