Kelpman

Kelpman:
chicken wire fellow (1996)
kelpflesh (2015).

A Twist In Time

Wire art: two pieces, four shots.   I made these one weekend in 1996 at a point in my life between grad school and the rest of it when I didn't think I'd be teaching again.  An octopus and a merman, among others, came out of that angst.  Maybe my first move toward sculpture besides carving pumpkins, decorating Easter eggs, whittling sticks, and playing with random play-doh since childhood.

Clay came later.

Olympian: Wire Art

Olympian; Or, The Athlete: chicken wire.  1996.

Old Wire: A Forsaken Merman

Chicken wire: clipped, twisted, and compressed; shaped.  Old garage art: 1996.

You should try this sort of garage art too.  I'll bet there's some old wire in the garage or around those tomato plants right now.  Try it.  Play.

(With a nod, of course, to Victorian poet Matthew Arnold and his poem "The Forsaken Merman.")

Old Wire

Back in Summer 1996, I was feeling the blues--no teaching gig, dissertation stalled, Dante's "dark wood" looming--so I went out to the garage and started bending chicken wire into shapes.  That's a merman (see his finny back?) to the left and an octopus to the right.  I also made wire masks (crow, fool, deer), human figures, and fish.

I had no plans to do anything with such pieces; I just needed to make things and working with words had gotten far too fraught.  Chicken wire happened to be handy, I guess.  Occasionally, in the years prior, I'd carve goblin faces in buckeyes and, of course, pumpkins, but making these wire pieces was an important step in letting myself play, in letting myself make and not judge, in not over-evaluating the products or the process.

Two or three years later, I started playing with clay for the first time since childhood.

I have had this notion to drape such wire art with kelp . . . .