During my many years as a university professor of media studies, I was primarily concerned with theoretical principles and digital production/ reproduction methods. In purposeful contrast, my sculptural art has always involved wood and other common tangible materials, employs tools and processes which are decidedly low tech, and results in unique and very physical objects.
That doesn’t really surprise me, because ever since I was a boy in rural Iowa, I have loved making things with my hands. So far as I can remember it’s as much fun as when I was a boy, and by now I also find such work to be ecological, therapeutic, even redemptive. If it sometimes appears to represent what I call “inefficiency in the pursuit of the unnecessary,” that’s a happily contrarian perspective, an act of quiet defiance. It is deeply gratifying in ways I can’t easily explain.
Some of the pleasure, though, is surely that it makes me feel connected with ancient artists and artisans–-across cultures and throughout the world—who routinely made things which were more carefully crafted and beautiful than they really needed to be.
By now, my work has also come to explore the boundaries between being and meaning. Some pieces simply “are what they are”. Others suggest a narrative or invite dialogue with viewers. It’s not an easy or clear distinction, even though I knew that poet Archibald MacLeish had once said, “A poem should not mean, but be.” As a long-ago English major and eventually an artist, however, just “being” suggested an emptiness which I found to be puzzling, destabilizing, and potentially “dangerous.” To identify anything as meaningless was to pause at the top of a slippery and precipitous slope.
But it was also enticing…and by now I often make physical things which have no meaning, let alone any function. A student once asked about one of my pieces, “What’s it for?” and I managed to reply, “It’s to keep anything else in the known universe from occupying that space.”
I certainly realize that I cannot keep people from creating meanings of their own, nor would I want to. Because I accept–even celebrate–the truth that the artist never “owns the meanings” anyway. I also accept that while I may start/steer such “conversations” with the titles of my pieces, viewers are free to ignore me.
But all in all, as I go about making things, I feel both joy and reverence in being part of the creative continuum which our ancient ancestors started at least 300,000 years ago. My work invites others to join me in those feelings.