During 2001 I worked in Corporate Relations in Manhattan for a large non-profit. Many of our clients were, and are the businesses downtown. I witnessed the burning building after the first plane hit from a safe distance, I was horrified, speechless, in shock as everyone around me. When I visited downtown clients who survived many weeks after 9/11, they freely spoke to me, sometimes on 0the verge of crying, of their still having nightmares about seeing workers jumping from the towers. As an artist I felt a calling to do a project about this part of the tragedy. I wanted to create a statement that might keep the raw emotion of the horror alive forever, to honor the feelings of the victims, and survivors and witnesses and always recall the heroic action of an unknown number of victims who had to make that decision.

I began the project in 2002 and worked on this up until I was satisfied with it in 2012. Creating it helped me in my own mourning process. I knew people who died there,and I have the most empathy for those family members and friernds who lost loved ones from whom no tangible burial has been possible. As an artist I needed to do a piece that represents those who choose this last act of their lives to face the least painful end of their heroic lives.

The work evolved slowly. It was a very difficult piece to make and it was the slowest creative process that I've ever gone through. It took me ten years working on it on and off. Months went by when I could not look at it. However, I was driven to create something to express our collective grief and pain. I realized now that it has been my mourning process, which is actually not over.. I don't think it ever will be.

It began with two leaning one-inch "cubes": 4 feet high, leaning welded to a large base. I didn't know what the counter-weight was going to look like.

I felt almost a religious calling to accomplish this. I have some sort of spiritual closeness with all my work, but this in particular was of the greatest significance and it took so long since I needed it to be perfect. I wanted to describe the inside pain in the gut of each and every victim. I had many doubts about it as it was built. Was it going to be too graphic? Too much violence for a viewer to understand?
Painful pieces of steel intertwined to create the insides of the body.

I wanted to show the pain first, but also the fighting against the violence, the pain in the world. With a moment of insight I figured out how to dothe arms...bending upwards and throwing off a piece of eyebeam. A gesture of hope, the urge to fendoff evil forces as much as we can, to threw them outward, away. It is an uplifting brave gesture.
I decidedone day to add a crossbeam similar to the crossbeam of the WTC facade that was left standing in the smoking rubble for months afterwards. The piece developed a more religious form with that, but I didn't want it to represent one religion. I removed the first representation of the head I had made, and simply put a halo, a circle of light and life as the pinnacle of the figure and gave it a lifting, tilting, rising feel. The piece is now balanced both falling and rising.
The spirit that each victim had and gave the world lives forever. After I added the halo, I felt a relief, like a heavy piece of my mourning had been lifted from me. I almost gave the halo color, maybe of the sky, or bright yellow fo the sun.. a hopeful symbol of people being one, together in unity someday. I decided against adding color to it.. I needed the gray steel to remain from top to bottom in unison.

To balance the whole sculpture it took years before I had the right idea to place the weight onthe left side of the base in the form of a broken skyscraper made out of eyebeams. This weight keeps the sculpture from falling. The photographs were taken from Liberty State Park, Jersey City, New Jersey which overlooked the rising Freedom Tower, and Statue of Liberty. I hope it will be accepted as a donation to a museum someday.