Deborah Banyas & T.P. Speer

Married since 1976, we have been collaborating on mixed-media sculpture since the early 90s. We combine a variety of media including sewn-stuffed cotton fabric, polymer clay, tooled metals and acrylic paint. A piece of our art usually starts out as a small sketch based upon some small event in our lives that we feel may have some poetic, expressive or "everyman" potential. The collaborative effort is most accute at this stage. The actual creation of the art objects is very straightforward. We use simple, direct construction techniques...nothing tricky or overly technical. The aesthetic aim is to marry several different materials into a unified whole, while retaining the character of each material. Emotionally we want our pieces to be very expressive and despite existing in a strange realm, still have real ties to everyday life.