Additive Sculpture

Snow, Slate, Concrete & Metal Artworks, 1988 to 2005

Statement

Over the years I've made many sculptures with idealized shapes - circles, squares, rectangles and parallel lines - to create a sense of transcendence beyond the messiness of daily life. This is an idealistic approach that shares some of the concerns of the early Modernist movement Suprematism. Suprematist artists such as Kasimir Malevich believed that non-objective artworks with geometric imagery could give individuals access to a realm of pure, aesthetic feelings. In his book on "Suprematism", Malevich writes:

Under Suprematism I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist, the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.

Malevich, Kasimir. The Non-Objective World. Munich: Bauhaus Book No. 11, 1927. Click here to read Malevich's Manifesto.

At times, this formalistic approach has distanced me from many of my peers who believe that contemporary artists must reach beyond Modernism and adopt an unflinching criticality toward social norms, institutions and conventions. With a desire to be more avant-garde, I made temporary site-specific works, installations with lifecast figures and a series of performance artworks titled "Have Lawn, Will Travel". These projects investigated a number of important social issues and exposed some of the challenges that people face in our fast-paced society.

Rewarding as these critical artworks have been, they've also been ephemeral. The longer-lived nature of permanent, public artworks has a different appeal because you can revisit the work and enjoy it over and over again. I find that sculptures constructed out of bronze, welded steel, stone and other durable materials seem to hold out the promise that no matter how screwed up the world becomes, there will always be a larger and more enduring reality around us.

It might sound like I'm talking about some abstract concept like Heaven, but I don't believe in an after-life, at least not in the sense that others think about it. This is what I believe: There is much more to Reality than our minds can comprehend. The collective consciousness of Humankind and other self-aware creatures might be the inevitable awakening of our Universe as it ages and matures. The Universe could be infinite and have an infinite number of atoms in it. Even so, there's only a finite number of ways in which those atoms can be organized. If this is the case, then repetition is inevitable. My individual consciousness may vanish when I die, but the exact combination of atoms, DNA and atomic nuclei that makes me who I am could be repeated at a distant point in the future and perhaps in some other part of the Universe. Who knows if that person would actually be me, but it's fun to imagine.

Sorry, I'm off topic. I meant to tell you about my additive sculptures. The opportunity to make such work is very limited because of the cost. When you add up the cost of renting studio space, paying for utilities, tools, supplies and help, a sculptor must have access to a lot of money through a commission or a grant to make large-scale sculptures. This means that the evolution of a sculptor's ideas will be very slow unless (s)he also works on a smaller scale. This is where my table-like works come in. I didn't make very many of them, because I couldn't sell them and I rapidly ran out of space to keep them. As I get older, my work seems to get smaller AND larger at the same time. My 2011 work for St. Albert's Community Recognition Project has been my largest project to date; my polymer jewellery have been my smallest works to date. When I was young, I spent a lot of time moping and feeling depressed because I wasn't making much art due to a lack of funds, but I don't worry about it anymore because I now see the futility of making only one kind of artwork.

I've also discovered that the competition to make large-scale public sculptures is very stiff. When a community finds itself in need of a public sculpture, they are usually able to solicit proposals from around the world (thanks A LOT Internet!). This means that an artist must be not just the best artist locally, but (s)he must also be the best artist globally, which is impossible! All in all, I think it makes much more sense for an artist to just make artworks for herself and to be ready when the opportunity to "go big" presents itself.

For fun, I like to make huge dragons out of snow. I spent an entire day one winter to build the one pictured here (I named him Gary). He was about seven feet high from the ground to the tip of his nose and about twenty feet long from his nose to the tip of his tail. I inserted broken twigs into his mouth to simulate razor-sharp teeth. I had to steal snow from my neighbour's yard because I used all of the snow in my own yard. This is Gary after I made wings for him and made his head a little bigger. Gary's new head was over fifty pounds in weight and so for the two weeks that it took for Gary to melt, I constantly worried that it would break off and squash one of the neighbors who came to see him.