The subject of water came to me more or less as a "found object." In the way primary structures informed Minimalism, I wanted to reintroduce image and representation into my art. I sought to capture the essence and the existence of water in nature, as if extracting autonomous shapes from the landscape. Water would function as a solid and become a form. The extracted shapes could be passive and reclining (like a lake), or wandering and serpentine (like a river), or standing in a state of suspension (like a waterfall). Interpreting the surface of these water forms allowed me a freedom to follow the course of gravity from liquid to solid.

The shift in Shift Falls is a directional change of course in the falls created by an imaginary shelf or shoulder in a mountainous landscape. The proportions and posture of the piece were intended to create a figurative presence with the head being the upper falls. The desire was to convey a larger-than life figure and, at the same time, falls that was released from an earthly mold.

When I first came to New York in 1972, one of the most powerful and transformative sculptures I encountered was Rodin's Balzac. As you walk around the piece, it becomes many things. It is an expressionistic portrait of a literary giant with the posture and pose of monumentality, but it also becomes a cliff, a megalith, a torqued tree trunk, and a waterfall — all seeming to be a container of life. Even the tool markings and the artist's hand looked fresh.

The other precedents that appeared most relevant when I began working with water were conceptually based artworks such as Barnett Newman's sculpture Here I and Richard Serra's splashed lead pieces. The Earthwork artists were breaking all the boundaries of sculpture while using photography and drawings to convey concepts and scale. I wanted to correlate process, earth-referenced forms, and sculpture making along with casting methods.

I am still attracted to water as a motif, but in different ways. There is more diversity in the references and meaning. It can carve, pour, erode, drip, float, divide, flow, shape, and go to unexpected places. *

*Excerpted from a response to a questionnaire submitted by the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts