The Practice Ground
Red Tennis Court Clay, 4x6‘ on wood panel.
Green Tennis Court Clay, 4x6 on wood panel.
Video, 1 hour, content: red oil paint on tennis balls hit against a 10 foot wall.
Drawing from my experience as a tennis pro, "The Practice Ground" transforms the philosophical contradictions embedded in tennis terminology into sculptural meditation. The work explores "no man's land", a precarious territory between baseline and net where players find themselves caught between safety and risk.
The tennis clay carries material memory for me, recalling childhood practice sessions in the heat, the meditative repetition of drills, and the love of tennis and it’s philosophical conncetions to life. The clay that was once the surface of competition and training, becomes a landscape of contemplation. The clay texture holds both activity versus stillness or clarity versus uncertainty.
The sculpture is a contemplate landscape not as fixed territory, but as space defined by movement, practice, and the philosophy found in repetition. No man's land becomes everywhere and nowhere. An unclaimed horizon where the boundaries between competition and meditation dissolve into the texture of clay.
