Post #7: An artist residency in Wyoming

I spent the first part of September at the Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts residency, near Saratoga, Wyoming. An artist residency like this is an incredible chance to focus on work while leaving the day-to-day minutiae behind. I was joined by seven other artists: two composers, two writers, a performance artist, and two other visual artists — part of the benefit of a residency like this is the cross-pollination of ideas it allows. This can be the practical (one of the painters has lots of experience using paints that withstand outdoor conditions), or abstract (a composer’s development of a piece of modern classical music has striking parallels to my own process of developing sculptural forms).

I focused on developing sketches for new sculptures, as well as roaming far and wide across the Ranch’s 15,000+ acres of sage, aspen, and piñon trees, making notes and taking photos of forms that interested me. It was a time to push existing ideas forward towards fruition, but also to be open to other projects that might strike me.

I just returned to my studio, and have my work cut out for me — sculpting some of the forms that I finished drawing while at the residency, and thinking about some of the forms that I just began developing. I’ll post images of these as they come.

Post #6: New Materials — Carbon Fiber and Metal Coating

Why New Materials?

The reasons a sculptor might decide to adopt a new material are as many as the materials one might choose. My motivation has always been hitting the structural limits of what’s possible in the materials familiar to me.

I’ve worked with wood ever since I was about three years old, when I began putting together scraps from the ongoing construction of my family’s home. And wood is still an essential material to me. But as my work has progressed over time, its limitations for certain types of forms have become clear. As the scale I work in has grown, as the structural demands on joints has increased, as the ways in which I want to incorporate balance and gravity have become more complex and nuanced, I’ve begun looking well beyond wood.

Carbon Fiber

Carbon fiber is one of the strongest materials, for its weight, anywhere. It’s often molded for aerospace or high-end automotive applications, but I’m developing my own method for applying it with an epoxy resin as a composite skin over another material, like an exoskeleton. This creates an extremely strong, rigid structure that’s greatly expanding the range of what I can do.

“Enclosing Form, Two Horizontals”
Acetylated wood wrapped in carbon fiber

It’s taken me weeks of research, false starts, huge messes, and tossed out pieces to get to a place where I have any feeling of proficiency with this system. And I know I still have a long way to go, so stay tuned for more on this.

In terms of finish, the carbon fiber can be left as the final surface (as in the images above and below). The woven pattern of the fibers themselves is somewhat visible and, like wood grain, becomes part of the sculpture. I can also obscure this pattern by adding a pigment to the epoxy, which results in a deep, opaque black finish that’s structural, rather than simply painted-on.

Metal Coating

I’m also experimenting with a high-tech system that coats the carbon fiber with a thin layer of liquid metal. The main benefit here is longevity and resilience — the metal coating will withstand weather much like a solid metal sculpture. Combining metal in this form with carbon fiber may offer the best of both worlds — the flexibility of form and structural strength that I can only get with by fabricating a sculpture out of solid material, with the resilience and light weight of thin metal that’s only otherwise possible with a cast sculpture. I’m thrilled about the possibilities that this opens up!

My first application of this material was over the carbon fiber piece shown in the two images above. This is a metal alloy very similar to stainless steel — though bronze, copper, iron, and other metals are possible as well.

“Enclosing Form, Two Horizontals”
Acetylated wood wrapped in carbon fiber, coated in metal

Post #5: “In and Out, Suspended”

Moving from standing, balanced sculptures to suspended ones is not a straightforward process… a form that balances upright may not work, structurally (let alone visually!) if suspended or even flipped upside down and suspended from its foot. The dynamics of the intersecting pieces depend entirely on their interaction with gravity and the point of support (that is, the point of suspension, here, or a standing sculpture’s foot).

“Three Twisting Verticals”
Wenge wood
61″ x 24″ x 2″

Post #4: “In and Over”

This is a sculpture that began on paper last fall while at an artists’ residency in southern France. I must have drawn and redrawn this form fifty times during that month (below left).

Next I made it in rough steel (above right), which helped me to see that I wasn’t happy with it… too complicated, and something essential was getting lost. I made some new sketches once I returned home, and finally was ready to move forward.

I finished this a few weeks ago. It’s much simplified, which I hope helps the form and the gesture to speak beyond the lines and the shape they suggest.

Title: “In and Over”
Dimensions: 24 x 29 x 2 inches
Material: Mahogany wood

Post #3: Balance

One of my main aims as a sculptor is to explore balance, the interaction between form and gravity. Over the last several years, balance itself has become my sculptural medium, as much as wood or metal.

The sculptures I’m currently focusing on each consist of intersecting parts that stand together as a whole — in perfect equilibrium — on a small foot. No means of attachment is needed. I’m exploring a sense of precariousness and vulnerability, contrasted with the works’ surprising stability. In this balance is a tension — between motion and stillness, between order and chaos.

Below is a link to a short video of me assembling one of my larger sculptures… a little visual demonstration of the functional role of balance and gravity in my work.

Post #2: Abstraction and Representation

(left) ”Four Pieces With Two Reaching Up,”  Bronze,   40″ x 20″ x 2″
(right)  ”Two Round Forms, Stacked,” Wenge wood,  42″ x 21″ x 2″

Where do these forms come from?

I try to not answer that question directly, as two people often see very different forms in the same sculpture, and that allows viewers to bring something with them to their encounter with the sculpture. But that said, the two images above may shed some light on this.

The two sculptures above are roughly the same size but come from very different inspirations (coincidentally, I made them almost exactly a decade apart: the wooden maquette of the bronze at left in 2002, the form to the right last year). I think they serve as good examples of a couple of different points on the wide spectrum between representation and abstraction that I work in. The form at left came from a more physical inspiration, while the form at right came more from a feeling, a sensation.

Essentially all of my forms come from the world around me, and my reactions to them, and I develop these on paper, working and reworking them. The balance that’s integral to each sculpture develops with this sketch; when the form looks right on paper to me, I know that it will balance in three dimensions, as well. At that point — when the sketch is done —  its origin may may be quite hidden (I’ve even worked with a form over so much time that it’s origin becomes a mystery to me!).

Post #1: Intro, and “Four Pieces Out and Up”

Hello Telluride Gallery Blog readers,

Instead of foisting a lengthy, cerebral artist’s manifesto on you, I’m going to use this first post to dive right in and talk about one of my newer works.

“Four Pieces Out and Up”
Black Walnut wood
15″ x 67″ x 2″

The forms I see within landscapes have always appealed to me as a subject matter, but for a long time they seemed outside of my sculptural lexicon — too macro in scale, too reliant on their contexts, better left to the two-dimensional arts. Perhaps more than anything, though, I had difficulty translating the inherent massiveness of the land into my work.

But recently I’ve realized that a path forward lies in capturing and distilling the gesture hidden within a landscape — by emphasizing this nuance, the context is no longer necessary.

My second challenge was realizing that gesture is something I’ve understand mostly in terms of human forms, which means I’ve had to work at adapting and improving my ability to capture gesture in non-anthropomorphic forms, and then use that to explore what’s most essential in that form.

The sculpture in the two images above — “Four Pieces Out and Up” — is my third effort in this direction, and likely not my last.

I’d love to see your comments  or questions, and I’ll do my best to reply, either in a post or directly to you.
June 25, 2012