21 April 2011: Mark Chuck photographed working on a sculpture at his home in Kingsley, Pennsylvania. Mandatory Credit: Alex Cena

Mark Chuck is an avid fisherman. He will travel great distance to witness one of nature’s fascinating life cycles. Every fall salmon migrate upstream in great numbers overcoming many obstacles to spawn, then die. This is a very emotional experience for him. Through the medium of ceramic sculpture, his work attempts to capture a process that documents an end to the salmon’s life cycle. Beginning with the biological refusal to accept nourishment, the salmon whose ability to self nourish atrophies, leaving only the option to exists off stored body fat for perhaps two to three months, begins a journey that culminates in a climax of fertilization and disintegration. The decomposing salmon at the end of its life cycle becomes nourishment for other organisms in the aquatic ecosystem that ensures survival of succeeding generations. For Mark, the observations of these phenomena are extremely meaningful. Nature and its conservation are compelling realities and provide for me the opportunity to artistically communicate his love of nature through his medium, clay. This interaction of his observation of nature and his primal material clay brings me to the essence of a sublime inner fulfillment as an artist.  Mark allows the clay to be itself as a primal material with its cracks and fissures, to evolve as the salmon, having no choice but to be as nature intended. A process controlled by an inner program of nature that returns through self propagation the certainty of a plan that ensures their kernel of life on earth and allows me in reflection to be a small part of an ongoing creative process.