my sculpture combining oak and stainless steel

Leonardo

My Sculpture Combining Oak and Stainless SteelAuthor(s): Katherine GouldSource: Leonardo, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter, 1981), pp. 1-4Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1574469 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 14, pp. 1-4. Pergamon Press, 1981. Printed in Great Britain.

MY SCULPTURE COMBINING OAK AND STAINLESS STEEL

Katherine Gould*

Abstract-The author describes her sculpture made from oak and steel. After briefly pointing out some of the developments in 20th-century visual art, she discusses the visual characteristics of oak and of polished stainless steel bars and how she utilizes them. She feels that her use of these materials that have apparently incompatible characteristics has resulted in their enhance- ment and provided her sculptures with a variety of contrasting artistic qualities. She concludes the article with a brief sketch of personal experiences pertinent to her recent work.

I.

A person, a landscape or a room is frequently comprehended most clearly in the context of complementing objects, for example the face that appears at a window, the mountain in a storm, the room with fresh paint on its walls. When I make sculpture I attempt to juxtapose oak and stainless steel forms in such a way that these two materials complement and enhance each other. The block of oak I am working on takes on a presence of its own in the space surrounding it. Then I add steel parts either as independent forms or as forms that pass through the oak form to help delineate its presence.

This procedure has an allegoric significance for me. Humans often rearrange their personal environment to make their existence more meaningful. Similarly, I arrange the combination of oak and steel forms in a sculpture to make its existence more meaningful. At best, such sculptures can evoke a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar associations for their viewers.

Sculpture has often served as monuments to heroes and kings, and as a past civilization's record for posterity. In the ancient Egyptian black granite sculpture of the pharaoh Tutankha- men, one can say that time stands still, and those who admire the art of this period are awed as they interpret the culture of 3,300 years ago. On the other hand, many find it difficult to understand what much of present-day visual art is about. The art made for the pharaohs was intended to extend their life into the afterlife and into the future. One might say that many contemporary artists extend the past into the present, in the sense of incorporating aspects of previous art into their own works. Since the beginning of the 19th century, developments in visual art have been so swift that artists have witnessed many changes

*Sculptor, 5827 S. Blackstone Ave., Chicago, IL 60637. (Received 24 Aug. 1979)

within their lifetime. For example, with a cubist's treatment of pictorial space Picasso produced works based on those by Diirer, Velasquez and C6zanne and on ancient Grecian urns and African sculpture; Pollock made chain-of-consciousness paintings and Tingely constructed a machine that dripped paint, in a manner resembling the techni- que used by Pollock, and then fell apart into a pile of junk. While many of the works of action painters imply violent motion, those of kinetic artists involve real motion and changes of colors with time.

II.

I am particularly interested in the possibilities of visual art providing new contexts for existence. The way one perceives changes in existence has become a subject for artists. For some of them it is the ambiguous, the tentative and the paradoxic- al that imply timelessness, perhaps because for them a sense of the timeless has replaced a search for immortality. Art as fiction can be used to reshuffle reality to suit one's purpose-one can shrink and expand aspects of one's experiences and present them concretely.

Relationships between time and forms in space can be experienced by viewers circling a sculpture to confront its changing aspects. My attitude is that no one aspect of a piece should be considered adequate, so that viewers are encouraged to become familiar with its many other aspects by moving around it. One way to achieve this aim is to minimize continuity in the appearance of a piece when seen from different viewing points in order to evoke surprise. The parts of a piece should be combined to provide a sense of opposi- tion that from some viewing points is reconciled. Often in Minimal-type sculpture these characteristics are lacking because they are essentially either two-sided or symmetric.

My most difficult task is to give presence to an

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Katherine Gould

Fig. 2. 'Night Knock', oak, stainless steel, 90 x 90 x 60cm, 1979.

Fig. 1. 'Intrusion, II', oak, stainless steel, 103 x 75 x 50 cm, 1978

untreated block of oak in terms of the block's form and grain patterns. When I visualize a form that could be made to emerge from a block, I bring it into being by carving and sanding the oak. When I find that I have taken good advantage of the block's characteristics, I carry on a kind of dialectical consideration of the oak form and the space surrounding it until I am able to visualize complementary relationships that can be estab- lished between it and added polished stainless steel tubes. The cool, reflecting steel parts of simple geometric form provide a contrapuntal aspect to the warmer, shaped oak form. They pierce space and delineate the space between them and the volume occupied by the oak form. These delineated internal spaces can be as strik- ing as the steel parts themselves.

The presence of the steel parts can produce other effects. It can cause the oak part to appear either lighter or heavier in weight and, if the oak part has a complex form, it will accentuate the linearity of the steel parts.

The steel parts, when their axes are at different angles to each other, provide in combination a different appearance from each viewing point, and their reflecting surfaces mirror whatever is in the immediate environment of the sculpture. The oak part may retain the form of the original block (Fig. 1) or it may have been changed completely to take account of the patterns of its grain (Fig. 2). I may accentuate the orange and brown tones of the oak by blackening parts of its surface with a blow torch flame (Fig. 3; Fig. 4, cf. color plate). Fig. 3. 'Standing Woman, IV', oak, 230 x 50 x 50cm, 1980.

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My Sculpture Combining Oak and Stainless Steel

The blackened areas both complement one's sense of the wood's warmth and conceal the grain patterns.

Although I carve the oak, I consider its surface like that of a painting. The grain pattern where I emphasize it stands out like an etched surface. Blackened areas can be made to seem to recede or they can be made to appear as shadows cast upon protrusions of the oak form by parts of the sculpture or by objects once nearby that are no longer there. The blackened areas may also some- times be seen as cracks caused by violent blows to the oak (Figs. 3 and 5; Fig. 4, cf. color plate). A feeling of tension is caused evidently by the perception of the contours of a particular form but whose surface coloring suggests a different form. Blacks tend to flatten a curved surface, and, on the other hand, patterns of grain in earth tones tend to extend it outward. Emphasis of the natural color of oak brings to mind flesh tones, particularly when it has an organic form. The cool steel parts seem to animate an oak form by contrast (Figs. 1-3).

Any angle between the axes of the steel tubes seems aesthetically satisfying to me (Figs. 1 and 2). The tubes can be welded at points of contact to provide a complex structure that seems to expand in space. This expansion is enhanced by light reflected from the surfaces of the tubes. I bear in

Fig. 5. 'Standing Woman, III', (detail), oak, 225 x 45 x 45 cm, 1979.

mind that a block of oak had its origin in a tree. Verticality of form and grain of a sculpted piece I associate with a growing tree and horizontality with one that has been felled (Fig. 1). I prefer to use a single block in a sculpture, because stacked blocks seem unnatural to me. Thus, the appropri- ate overall dimensions of a work are determined by the size of a block available to me and not by the length of steel tubes, which can be increased readily.

For figurative pieces, I carve a block of oak with the grain vertical and retain some evidence of its original form so that viewers will be aware of the transformations it has undergone (Figs. 3 and 5). I find that such awareness gives one the impression that a sculpted female figure extends beyond the boundary of the carved oak. This may be noted by comparing the head of 'Standing Woman, IV' (Fig. 3) with her feet, both of which occupy about the same volume but the head appears larger.

m.

I began my work as a sculptor by making welded steel pieces in Chicago in 1966 [1]. In the 1960s in the U.S.A. wide attention was given to the last works in steel by David Smith and to those of other sculptors such as Anthony Caro and Richard Hunt. They combined rigid metal parts into large lyrical pieces. In the 1970s, for example, Mark de Suvero and Carl Andre emphasized simplicity and ruggedness by combining structural elements such as wooden and metal beams used in building construction. In 1972 I spent several months in Japan, where I studied the early architecture and the gardens of private homes, palaces and temples. In their use of natural materials, Japanese artists and artisans draw one's attention to the 'woodeness' of wood, the 'stoneness' of stone and the 'waterness' of water. Not only are the potentialities of individual materials exploited, but they effectively combine different ones, as for example in gardens.

Upon my return to Chicago, I decided to combine stainless steel structures with oak forms. Some of the resulting works I have described above.

My recent pieces consist of a series of female figures carved from oak beams, and I treat the oak as described in Part II (Figs. 3 and 5; Fig. 4, cf. color plate). While I am aware of classical Greek and African sculptures of women and the works of Aristide Maillol and Henry Moore, my objective is very different. As a woman reared in the U.S.A., I find it difficult to make idealized identifications of the biological aspects of the female figure with either goddess, sorceress or 'mother earth'-my portrayals-are less canonical.

I began to exhibit the oak and steel works in 1977. The critic Harold Haydon made the follow- ing comment on them: 'Her decision to combine the rugged strength and color of oak timber with

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Katherine Gould

the sleek beauty of stainless steel in monumental sculptures comes at a time when interest in the expressive nature of materials has been renewed in all the visual arts ...' [2] (see also Ref. 3).

Upon seeing an exhibition of my oak and steel sculptures in Paris in 1979, the choreographer Leslie Gifford of New York City produced the same year a dance event in Paris to the music of Phillip Glass. The dance was based on his reac- tions to my works. Entitled 'Wood, Steel and Glass', it was performed by a woman dancer in a

large white-painted room containing five of the sculptures. The event was well received by the audience, and I would like to have another one produced that is based on my latest works.

REFERENCES

1. D. Meilach and D. Seiden, Direct Metal Sculpture (New York: Crown, 1968) pp. 9 and 95.

2. H. Haydon, Sculpting, Sunday Sun Times (Chicago, 21 Aug. 1977).

3. Art Forum, photograph, (Oct. 1977).

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LIST OF FIGURE LEGENDS FOR COLOUR PLATE





Top left: Katherine Gould. 'Standing Woman, IV' (detail of Fig. 3, cf. page 2), oak, 230 x 50 x 50cm, 1980. (Fig. 4, cf.

page 2)


page 2)


page 2)


page 2)


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Top right: P. K. Hoenich. An image from 'Light Symphony, No. 1'. (Fig. 5, cf. page 40)





Center: Adam Wsiolkowski. 'The Unknown City, C', oil, acrylic, canvas, 110x110cm, 1979. (Photo: K. Rzepecki,

Cracow, Poland) (Fig. 7, cf. page 21)









Bottom left: Takhir T. Salakhov. 'Portrait of the Composer Kara-Karayev', oil on canvas, 120 x 200 cm, 1960. (Fig. 1, cf.

page 13)


page 13)


page 13)


page 13)


page 13)

Bottom right: Joseph Germana. 'Sunshower Enlightment', watercolors, acrylic gel medium, modeling paste, illustration board, 16 x 16cm, 1979. (Photo: M. Strawn, Blacksburg, Va.,

U.S.A.) (Fig. 4, cf. page 35)











my sculpture combining oak and stainless steel

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