Stainless steel cable is a commercial/industrial product that comes in may different formulations and sizes. I use 304 grade stainless steel cable in 7 strand, 9 to 25 thread [single wire] cable in 3/16, 1/4, and 1/2 inch diameters. Seven strand cable is made up of 6 spiral strands that surround a straight core strand. This straight core strand is itself a smaller diameter cable in the diameter sizes that I use.
Uniqueness of My Stainless Steel Cable Sculptures
In the entire world, there are very few sculptors using stainless steel cable. And to my knowledge, I am the only sculptor creating sculptures exclusively from disassembled stainless cable that is then reassembled to achieve a desired sculptural form.
My Creative Process
In my view, all art that is worthy of the name results from a confluence of technical-intellectual and sensory-intuitive processes. And when it comes to sculpture, significant physical manipulation can be involved as well. Cutting ½ inch cable from a drum roll requires a special cutter and multiple hits with a sledge hammer – this is tough stuff! Stainless steel cable in the diameter sizes and drum roll quantities that I use is a commercial/industrial product that is lubricated to promote and sustain its flexibility. As such, disassembling a 50 foot section of ½ inch cable into its constituent parts is a time consuming, greasy, physical chore. It can even be a bit bloody as the ends are sharp and there is the need for a lot of repeated physical movement in both disassembly and reassembly.
In the initial design process, I use 1/16 inch cable to explore different design ideas in an effort to come up with a model of what I want to try to execute with the larger diameter cable material. Design ideas themselves arise for me in a very kinetic visual process – usually while I am “resting” in my lounge chair or sliding gradually into sleep at bedtime. This is the largely intuitive component in my process, and I often have to resort to it when I am in search of options as a consequence of running into difficulties while trying to execute a project. Alternatives also arise visually during every step in the assembly process. So, rarely does the final sculpture closely resemble the initial model. And again, assembling and disassembling the individual strands as I pursue different options in the assembly process is often quite physical, dirty and sometimes frustrating. Determining how to “terminate” a sculpture – bring the “ends” together in a satisfactory manner – can be one of the most challenging parts in creating a sculpture. And then the ends have to be cut exactly and capped, and the entire piece has to go through a staged cleaning process. On average and working full time, I can produce one sculpture about every two weeks – not including the frequent returns for final “tweaks.” For me, “good” sculpture reflects the coordinated input of intellect, intuition, kinetic visualization, and physical manipulation – each at the right time and to the appropriate degree.
What Do My Sculpture “Mean?”
Determining meaning in art is a tricky business, and in my professional experience as a social scientist who has researched this very matter, it is a lot more complicated and varied than most interpreters of art realize. Whatever my sculptures may “mean” to me as the artist, I am very much aware that art is ultimately in the “eye” of the beholder. So, I am reluctant to shrink “meaning” in my sculptures to what my intent may be. After all, the “duty” of art is to catch the attention of the viewer/listener and hold him or her long enough to evoke at least an immediate response and if possible to illicit a deeper experience. And each experience is individual with meaning sometimes occurring at a level of which the individual is not even aware! So, my recommendation is again that you go enjoy some viewing of my sculptures and look to your own reaction before you take on the next topic section which describes MY point of view!!
My Motivation or Intent
Like most people, I engage reality from many different perspectives. One of these perspectives is as an artist/sculptor. Another perspective that is essential in my life is that of a professional social scientist. And for me, my sculpture reflects the intersection of at least these two points of view. As a professional research social scientist with an interest in “the big picture,” my view of reality is much influenced by the basic discoveries that have “exploded” mostly in my lifetime in the physical sciences – especially theoretical physics, astrophysics and cosmology. I find it especially illuminating that these modern physical sciences now recognize that at the root of all phenomena at every scale in reality is a very basic dichotomy: the force of attraction or accumulation – things coming together, and the force of repulsion or separation – things coming apart.
There are many different ways to characterize this basic dichotomy in different realms of physical, ecological, social and psychological reality: order and chaos, gravity and dark energy, fusion and fission, growth and decay, formal and informal, gain and loss, synthesis and analysis, love and hate, success and failure, unity and division, intuition and intellect, communal values and individual values, positive and negative, create and destroy, community benefit and self-interest, rise and fall, expand and contract, win and lose, constraint and freedom, ascend and decline, advance and retreat, construct and demolish, develop and collapse, concrete and abstract, light/white and dark/black, etc. And even in the very process of creating my sculptures, there it is: assemble and disassemble! Noteworthy is the fact that while most of the time we view the “attraction” side much more positively in these dichotomies, occasionally the opposite is the case, eg. “constraint and freedom.”
In part, my sculptures attempt to exhibit and explore this fundamental attraction-repulsion, order-chaos, formal-informal dichotomy. So, on the one hand, formality, regularity and symmetry are displayed which are associated with “order.” And on the other hand, informality, irregularity and asymmetry are on display which are associated with “disorder or chaos.” Accordingly, some of my sculptures are very formal, some are quite informal, and some display an interactive mix of both formality/order and informality/disorder. And then some sculptures reveal the constant emergence or cycling in and out of both formality and informality – the yin and yang of life.
At a primal level, all humans have to be committed to supporting structure and to restraining the forces of decay if they are to live as material entities successfully in society and nature. But in this overall and more order inclined context, it is just a fact that some individuals are drawn more to the display of regularity and formality in art while other individuals are inclined to seek the stimulation that can come from the display of informality and free expression. And then the mood of the moment may open a very formally oriented person to invite the provocative experience of informality. The essential personality of the individual, the occasion, the context, and the moment all coalesce to incline each person in one direction or the other, or some mix. My sculptures, which rest in different locations on a formal to informal continuum, explore in art the fundamental dichotomy of the order/attraction and disorder/repulsion dynamic in all of reality. So, I think that potentially there are sculptures to fit all of the personal inclination options.
That is enough “intellectual analysis,” which can be the plague of academic social science when it comes to understanding art. But this analytical perspective is the other side of who I am. And, like it or not, it participates in what motivates my sculptures. Those interested in further pursuing this matter of meaning and intent in art can bring up the alternative statement titled, “TAB Sculpture – The Match of Materials and Meaning” available in the Menu Bar. For more yet on this subject, you can go to my social science website – www.dynamic-humanism.com – and look at my essay, “The Role of Art in Dynamic Humanism.”
My Sculpture History
I began my professional career teaching and researching in a PhD. program in the Social Science of the Traditional Arts – Folklore – at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. During the first few years, I became disenchanted with the range of available theory to account for art and especially to illuminate the artistic process. There was just far too much analytical based, intellectual imposition in the interpretations being offered, and these interpretations focused on accounting for art as a product rather than as a reflection of a process. My reading in the areas of developmental and evolutionary psychology, parapsychology, and creativity suggested that the intuitive and inspirational were at least as important in accounting for art as the intellectual and analytical.
In order to ground what my reading and research were revealing, in the mid 1980s I sought a personal experience creating art. As a younger person, I had been an athlete and a dancer, and I had experienced what is described as “flow” in these activities. And as an adult, this same sense of being and reality was characteristic in quality sexual relations. So, with a doctorate in my discipline, I went “back to school,” and as an undergraduate, I completed a three year metal smithing program at the Philadelphia College of the Arts. My culminating “senior” project focused on the use of smaller diameter stainless steel cable in jewelry and sculpture. I expected to be able to pursue this interest in the following years, but continuing research and then a move to a rural farm property in south-central Oregon took me in many alternative directions. Along the way, I bought drum rolls of larger diameter stainless steel cable, but building, developing and maintaining property took priority along with efforts to encourage ecologically responsible management on the vast public lands of the area.
Finally, after a move to town and a year and a half renovating the house we bought, the opportunity arose to get back to “sculpting.” It had been a 32 year hiatus! Most of 2018, all of 2019 and the first two months of 2020 has been devoted to this process, resulting in the creation of 49 sculptures – the core of the corpus offered for your perusal on this site. I have included just two sculptures from the formative 1980s period. The earlier sculptures are presented at the beginning of the “Full Gallery” file and are dated 1985 on the card that appears in each video and accompanying still photo. The rest of the Full Gallery file is numbered and dated by year in the order of the creation of the individual sculptures. Presently, there are 51 sculptures in all.
Creating Images of My Sculptures
It has been a lengthy process to reach the point of being moderately satisfied with the visual presentation of my sculptures for this website. Sculpture is almost always 3 dimensional, and unfortunately still photography reduces 3 dimensions to 2 dimensions and a singular point of view. My sculptures are new – not seen before objects – and so they are not readily “interpreted” by the viewer from this 2 dimensional “flat” and singular perspective. And as the stainless cable that I work with is highly polished and “comes alive” in the context of directed and shifting light, still photos unfortunately tend to fix and “wash out” the subject. To address this problem, we finally determined to video each sculpture on a rotating turntable from a fixed position and under remarkably low, ambient light. The resulting rotational motion with the light shifting across the surface of the stainless strands reveals both the 3 dimensional nature of the sculptures and at least something of the radiant quality of the visual experience. My hand appearing in the videos turning the turntable – while otherwise a distraction, nevertheless provides a reference for the size of each sculpture. In the future, there may be a professional version of the video presentation. Both the Selected Gallery of fifteen sculptures and the Full Gallery of 51 sculptures include a still shot together with a video of each sculpture. So, while videos play a crucial role in presenting a quality visual experience of my sculptures, a still shot option is nevertheless available.
The sculptures range in size from 6”w x 5”d x 4”h to 24”w x 24”d x 29”h. The average sculpture size is about 18”w x 12”d x 10”h with a lot of variation. The sculptures range in weight from a few ounces to 25 pounds.
Presently, my sculptures are not available for sale.