About 40 years ago, on my first visit to Storm King Art Center, the first sculpture I walked up to was a three-story-high Calder that reminded me of the Queen of Hearts. I loved the scale, the soaring shape, and the sense of play in something so enormous. When I began welding sculptures of my own, my motto was "The bigger the better."

My first chance to work at that scale in public came in 2007, when I was invited to make a sculpture for an outdoor exhibition on a working cow farm, Saunders Farm, in Garrison, NY. Since then, my sculptures have found homes in parks, on municipal campuses, and in civic spaces throughout New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, and Massachusetts.