Keeper of the Garden
As you may have gathered from other pages on this site, I was once the Artist in Residence at the San Francisco Dump (A truly fantastic program). That was a little while ago now, but I was recently approached by them to make a piece for their sculpture garden, yes the dump has a sculpture garden. The condition was that the piece be made from materials collected at their facility. Since I am out there collecting often anyway this was not much of a stretch.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Since the piece has to live outdoors I wanted to limit my materials to primarily metal. The trouble is that with its recycling value metal is actually rather scarce at the dump. None the less I was able to come up with a gas meter, some baseball bats, bicycle handlebars, truck hubcaps, curtain rod ends, faucet hardware and other miscellaneous bits.
I was really feeling the limitations of not being able to work with motion or lighting to help provide character the way I usually do. My solution was to give the piece two distinct personalities, one on each side. This means the sculpture has no “back”. My hope is that it will be placed along a path so that it greets visitors both coming and going.
The element I am most happy with is the deer antler arms. I have used antlers in many pieces before, but never as anything other than antlers. This opens new possibilities for an old material which is always inspiring.
