- Right now I'm with sculptor and painter Thomas Sayre, who brought the exhibit Four Walls to the Cameron Art Museum.

So Thomas, each wall represents something different, and I understand this entire exhibit is very personal to you.

- It is.

So three of the four walls, there was some existing work.

For instance, the crosses.

I've been making crosses for 25 years, and I kept adding to the collection, and so this is the first time they've ever been shown, almost all of them in one place.

- [Deborah] What's really special is the materials that you use to create these images.

Talk about the materials for each one.

- Well, I'm known, Deborah, as you know, for digging in the earth and making earth castings where the human hand goes into the ground and collaborates to make this thing which is partially intentional and partially you get what you get, and all these materials are similar.

Smoke, water, burning, burning in various ways, pouring, so these are all, you know, non-art materials generally that I use their properties to create the life of the piece.

Well, this is called Their Solitary Way, which is a short phrase from Milton's "Paradise Lost" which I read when I was 19 as an English major, and during the heavy duty hardcore lockdown, I just started listening to that poem, which is 400 pages, again, and I started kind of illustrating in a way the narrative or some of it.

You know, in the Bible, the story of the fall is half a page and then Milton expands it to 400 pages and makes all this stuff up, and it was permission for me as a visual artist to make a bunch of stuff up.

- Artistic license, I love it.

- But this directly relates to the "Paradise Lost" and the biblical story.

This of course is the tree where the apple was, and in my view, the eating of the apple set in motion the dance of us humans.

You know, we're both godlike and devil-like, and we're not in paradise, and we have to farm our farm as Adam and Eve did when they were kicked out of paradise as we keep going, and they end up as farmers in a hard scrapple farm.

- [Deborah] Tell me about the flag, how that's created and kind of what that's telling people.

- Well, the other three walls have to do with, I mean, "religious" or "sacred" subjects, if you will.

And the fourth wall I felt wanted to be about something a little different.

And you know, the state of our country's on all of our minds, and I was talking to my friend Victor, and we started thinking about how would we represent the flag of America?

And we came up with this burned and charred flag, but behind it, and you can see through it, is a perfect American flag that's completely to federal specifications and color and all that, and you are invited to walk behind or between these two flags, the ideal and the tattered flag, which may say something about where we are now as a country and we, the citizens, are in between adjudicating how we fall on that spectrum of ideal, however you think of that, and where we really are now, - Thomas, this is a very meaningful and powerful exhibit.

Thank you so much for sharing more about it.

- My pleasure, thank you.

- [Deborah] The Cameron Art Museum is at 3201 South 17th Street in Wilmington, and it's open Tuesday through Sunday.

The Thomas Sayre exhibit Four Walls runs through February 16th, 2025.

For more information, give the museum a call at [910] 395-5999 or go to cameronartmuseum.org.