DRIFTWOOD SERIES: COMPLEXITIES OF THE HEART

Driftwood Series: Complexities of the Heart
Fall 2009
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Most often, when I am developing a sculpture, I focus on the shapes and relationships of the materials to one another first. Later on, the piece starts to come together and I begin to form mental images of where I might go with the piece. At that pint, I am doing a lot of trial and error and select and discard different materials that seem promising from my stockpiles. I may twist and turn a particular piece of driftwood for what seems to be forever in search of a particular angle that speaks to me. On the other hand, I can sometimes lay selected objects in a pile and know they will work together without further examination. The process sometimes suggests a topic, or theme, or title for the final piece.

When I was working on this sculpture, it was different. I was already thinking about relationships and how difficult and complex they were. I don’t usually start with a theme, but in this case I knew I wanted to do something involving this topic. My first step was to write down a list of words that came to mind and that I associated with relationships in some way … layers, diverse, embrace, hard, soft, heart, black, askew, shape, etc. I dove into my materials piles to see what I could find. I selected a variety of shapes and sizes of driftwood that might combine in such a way as to express the layering and to imply the complexity. Unbelievably, in my metals bin, I found a heart that I had made for a sculpture that had been dismantled. I utilized the hardness of the coarse wire mesh used to make the heart and a layer of black paint to hint at the potential darker side of dealing with relationships. I also wanted to contrast the softer, more natural wood with the use of harder metal to further add a sense of opposing ideas and clashing.

Positioning was important to me in the assemblage. I wanted the piece to be slightly askew and I wanted a sense of movement (I chose left to right across the placement of the heart). The heart is purposefully not centered. However, it is cradled by curved driftwood pieces that I used to represent arms and the idea of an object being nestled or embraced. Contrast again … black heart … embracing.

At some undetermined moment, I kinda know at a piece is done. In this case, I hung the sculpture on my barn wall and tried moving around the room to check it out at different angles. The key words heart and complex seemed to stick. I chose Complexities of the Heart for a title and it seemed right.

A couple of days later Anne called me at work to ask me about a price for the piece. A friend’s sister, Mary, had stopped by and had seen the piece in the barn. Mary purchased the piece and took it to her cabin to go with an earlier piece her sister had gotten from me for her. The sculpture now resides in Minnesota.