Good afternoon, and welcome.
It's such an honor to be here with you as you begin your time at Bowdoin.
As an artist, I've spent much of my life working with clay and plaster.
What keeps me coming back to the studio year after year is not the finished objects. It's the process of discovery itself.
I still walk into the studio not knowing exactly what will happen, and I've come to think of that as the best part.
When I start a new sculpture, I never plan the outcome ahead of time.
Instead, I find a catalyst: a material, a form, an idea, or a question that fuels my curiosity.
The process is messy. Early on, I broke things constantly. To put it kindly, I was a bit of a brute with my materials. Forms collapsed. Pieces cracked. Work that I spent hours on came apart in my hands.
At first, every break felt like failure. But slowly, I learned to work differently: to build in parts that could shift and adapt, and more importantly, to allow for the unexpected. A break wasn't the end of the work. Often, it showed the way forward.
Over time, that lesson became more than technique. Breaking down and rebuilding, entropy and change—these became central themes as the work began to reveal something that I couldn't have planned from the beginning.
Over the years, I've realized that the creative process and a liberal arts education share fundamental elements.
Both thrive on curiosity and invite us to be transformed by what we encounter.
Both ask us to loosen our grip on certainty and remain open to possibility.
And both challenge us to reconsider how we perceive the world and how we understand our place within it.
A liberal arts education is valuable because it helps you navigate uncertainty. Whatever direction you pursue, you will need the ability to grapple with questions that refuse easy answers, and the capacity to adapt and persevere when the path forward is unclear.
That's the kind of work the studio asks of me, too.
Sculpture is an intensely physical way of thinking. I come to understand ideas not only through my mind, but through my hands, my body, and my senses. Again and again, the studio reminds me that understanding begins with experience.
Diane Ackerman captures this beautifully when she writes: “There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.”
I return to that idea often: that our senses are not simply passive receivers, but active participants in creating our understanding of reality.
And if our senses are so crucial to how we encounter the world, then how do we sharpen and extend the limits of those perceptions?
How can we heighten our sensitivity to what surrounds us?
Lawrence Weschler tells a story that's always stayed with me from his book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.
In the 1960s, two artists, Robert Irwin and James Turrell, along with the scientist Ed Wortz, were fascinated by perception and the limits of human awareness.
They took turns spending hours alone inside an anechoic chamber, a specially engineered room that absorbs virtually all sound, even the most subtle echoes and vibrations.
With the lights off, it becomes a place of complete darkness and profound silence.
Imagine it. Imagine sitting in total darkness for hours.
No phone. No music. No conversation. No visual distractions. Nothing to do but attend to your own perceptions.
Irwin described hearing his heartbeat, even what he took to be the electrical hum of his own nervous system, faint sensations that would normally be drowned out by the noise of everyday life.
But what fascinated Irwin and the others most was not what happened inside the chamber. It was what happened when they left.
After spending hours deprived of familiar sensory input, the world outside appeared transformed.
As Irwin put it: “The trees were still trees, and the street was still a street, and the houses were still houses, but the world did not look the same.”
That's the part that stays with me. Everything familiar suddenly felt more vivid. More alive. More surprising.
Irwin realized that we often move through life seeing only what we expect to see. We filter out an enormous amount so that we can go about our day-to-day lives. But as a result, we stop noticing just how much richness and complexity surround us.
For Irwin, nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed. He had rediscovered the world around him, tuning in more fully to what was already there.
At its best, a liberal arts education offers that same invitation to step outside your familiar ways of seeing.
The goal is not merely to know more. It is to encounter the world more fully.
And that way of seeing doesn't arrive all at once. Like any meaningful practice, you build it slowly, one attempt at a time.
Right now, arriving at Bowdoin may feel like the opposite of sensory deprivation.
You're surrounded by new people, new ideas, new routines, and more information than you can possibly absorb.
It may feel noisy. It may feel overwhelming.
And yet the next four years have the potential to produce a similar shift in perspective.
If you give yourself fully to this place, you may discover that the world looks different when you leave than it did when you arrived.
Not because the world changed (although it is and it will).
But because you changed.
And to me that distinction feels especially relevant today.
Powerful technologies increasingly blur the boundary between what is generated and what is directly encountered—between what is simulated and what is lived.
This makes the questions raised by Irwin, Turrell, and Wortz feel newly urgent.
How do we navigate this shifting landscape without losing sight of what matters to us, without losing sight of our own agency and what it means to be fully human?
The ability to perceive carefully and engage deeply is more valuable than ever.
Which raises a larger question: what do we actually want from our lives, and what does it mean to live a fulfilling life?
The philosopher Robert Nozick has a thought experiment built for exactly this question. He calls it “The Experience Machine,” and it asks whether we would choose a perfectly simulated life over a real one.
Suppose there existed a machine that could offer you the life you most wanted to live.
You could plug into this machine and live a life of accomplishment, adventure, love, joy—anything you wanted.
Every experience and sensation would feel completely real.
Everything would go exactly the way you hoped.
Would you choose it?
Would you choose to spend the rest of your life in that perfectly satisfying illusion?
Most people ultimately say no.
And perhaps everything going exactly the way you hoped is precisely the problem.
Most of us want lives that are genuinely lived. We want experiences that challenge us, surprise us, and help us grow.
We want the satisfaction of wrestling with obstacles and coming out stronger on the other side.
We want to take part in the messy and vulnerable process of becoming who we are, even if it is messy and vulnerable.
Which raises a question that I think matters even more: what kinds of experiences actually change us?
To me, that question lies at the heart of a liberal arts education, the same way it lies at the heart of the studio.
That kind of change doesn't happen from a distance. You have to be willing to get your hands dirty, to try something you don't know how to do, and to keep going when something doesn't work.
Even after all these years, every new sculpture asks me to begin again.
Each one reminds me that the most meaningful discoveries happen when I stop trying to control every outcome.
As you begin your time at Bowdoin, you may feel pressure to know who you are, what you will study, what career you will pursue, and where your life is headed.
But perhaps the better approach is the one I've learned in the studio.
You don't need to have everything mapped out, and in fact the results are often better when you don't.
Over the next four years, you will shape this community just as this community will shape you.
You will be both the maker of your education and one of its creations.
The moments that shape you are not always the dramatic ones. Often, they are quieter: a conversation that lingers after a class, a book you didn't expect to love, a friend whose view expands your own. These moments rarely announce themselves. But over time, they accumulate and quietly reshape how you see the world and how you see yourself.
Your job at Bowdoin is not simply to accumulate knowledge. It is to engage with those moments.
Like any worthwhile creative process, your education and even your sense of who you are will emerge gradually.
It will happen through repetition more often than revelation. Through showing up. Through trying. Through beginning again.
The best sculptures I've made did not emerge because I knew where I was going. They emerged because I stayed with the process long enough for something unexpected to reveal itself.
The same has been true of me. Becoming the artist I hoped to become wasn't the result of a single breakthrough. It happened through the practice itself.
Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't just shaping the material. The process was shaping me as well.
And my hope is that years from now, you'll be able to say something similar about your time here.
Like Irwin, Turrell, and Wortz emerging from the anechoic chamber, you may find that the world is still the same world when you leave Bowdoin.
The trees will still be trees.
The streets will still be streets.
But you may discover that you no longer see them in quite the same way.
And because you see differently, you may begin to live differently as well, more awake to the possibilities around you and more in tune with what you're capable of creating.
Not all at once. But gradually. The way anything worth building takes shape.
Welcome to Bowdoin.
I can't wait to see what you make of it. Thank you.
