ROADSIDE ANGEL

      I recall many family trips in my dad's Impala driving across the friendly, familiar landscape along Highway 80 southeast from Bisbee to my Nanita's little home across the border in Mexico.  Once, I asked my father about the many roadside monuments we passed with religious figurines and votive candles. He explained that each little mound was a shrine a family built in remembrance to a victim of a fatal car wreck.

     At 5, my mind connected these roadside reliquaries with the shrine found at our destination, Nanita's house, where she kept a personal shrine  at the end of the bed I slept upon. Her shrine held many religious figurines with candles at their bases that burnt continually day and night.  The last thing I saw, as I drifted into sleep, were the elongated shadows that eerily wavered and swayed at the slightest movement of air.  Somehow, I just  knew that  these  shadows escaped  that room to dance their way down Highway 80. In time, I eventually made friends with these apparitions on the walls. 

     The Roadside Angel series pays tribute to all lives that were lost along Highway 80 and to my Nanita and her shrine in that little house. Each Roadside Angel sculpture is marked with a Highway number on the nape of the neck, starting with 81,  creating an imaginary extension of Highway 80.  Each sculpture sits on a steel shrine that allows a votive candle to be placed at the base to make angel shadows that sway and dance out of the room to begin a trip of its own down the Highway.