Specification: Site-specific plaster sculpture, 5' x diameter of 18", set at the Utica Sculpture Space in Utica, NY, 1998.

Description: The vessel becomes a guage to view negative space in a run-down indystrial neighborhood of the city.

I'm sitting in my garden, in the heart of New York City, the mimosas' leaves getting ready to spring into late May air. I'm reading Susan Quinn's biography of Marie Curie--learning more about why I middle-named my daughter for this unusual woman: brilliant, biter, asocial, humanitarian, devoted distant mother, recipient of two Nobel Prizes. Marie loved rose gardens and she discovered radium. I'm reading about the accidents of fate for the Curie family at the outbreak of the First World War. What strikes me is that even the so-called female qualities of nurturing, of being close to nature, in the collaboration of one mother and daughter, lie a basis for mass destruction and horror of a century to come. Brilliantly creative mothers too have their role to play in the depredations of a holocaust.

Barbara Westermann, in " Garden Court," Temple University, 1995