Lost Wax

It’s crazy how a nose from one direction can look perfectly fine, and viewed from 180 degrees, it’s too close to the eye. When I work on small wax figures, I turn them continuously around in my hands, making sure, for example, the left elbow doesn’t extend below the hip while I carve the right side of the torso. Working on a larger piece, I circle continuously; this partner dance assures everything works from all perspectives. 

Refuge, 2020, in wax in my studio. The endangered sea turtle and giraffe are rescuing the humans.

Our planet faces a ferocious loss of habitat, fifty percent of the species on the earth have disappeared in the last forty to fifty years. We’re a destructive species causing the acidifying of the ocean, the loss of precious topsoil, and the poisoning of the very air we breathe. The animals haven’t caused this harm—we have. But I like to think, despite our recklessness and selfishness, they would choose to save us.

I delivered Refuge to the foundry in early January, needing to cut off the giraffe’s legs to fit in my car. 

The turtle arrives at the foundry.

Not a problem for Zach Gabbard, owner and sole fabricator at Mission Foundry in Hyde Park. He will be taking it further apart—flippers, turtle shell, giraffe head, giraffe tail, turtle tail, and each individual person to make rubber molds.

Once he has the rubber molds, he will pour casting wax into them—the small figures solid, the large shapes like the giraffe body receive a thin layer so they can be hollow. When Zach has these wax pieces complete, he will attach the small ones together and build a funnel above each one—the constructions, intriguing modern mobiles.

The next step is to create the molds to receive the molten bronze. Each of these wax mobiles are dipped into a silica slurry nine times to slowly building up the mold. They are dipped, then coated with sand, and hung to dry for at least a day between dips.

At the pour, the funnel on top of each mold receives the liquid bronze, the wax melts out, lost wax, and the bronze hardens. These hard shells are then hammered and broken to free them from the bronze inside.  

There are still days of work ahead for Zach. He has to cut off the sprues and funnels. He has to sandblast each piece to get the specks of hard shell out of every crevice. Then the individual pieces will be welded together. Zach has to know how to replicate the textures I sculpt in my wax sculpture, and he has to do it in metal so the welded seams disappear. He has to care about the subtleties of the texture, with the deliberateness of a poet choosing words to describe the grooved furrows of an oak trunk.

I returned to the foundry a few weeks ago to position each of the the small bronze figures on the backs of the giraffe and turtle. Zach welded each one in place.

Then Refuge received its final patina and wax polish. It’s a long process. This piece is signed and numbered 1/5. Though my original waxes have disappeared, I have the molds to make four more copies. But always, for each one, we have to first make a new wax model, then cast it into bronze. After five copies, we’ll destroy the molds. 

Lost wax is an apt metaphor for these times: The only way to create something new is to lose something.  While we are collectively facing tremendous loss, it is good to reflect on the space that allows for something new to arise. The loss is real—people’s lives, habitat, species, jobs, freedom. I am alarmed, but I dearly want to believe that we can turn things around. We need humility. We need respect for every living being on the planet. Then the turtle and the giraffe, the heron and the wasp, the oak, the waterlily, and even the gnat will all be helping because we are all interconnected.

Refuge would have been outdoors at the Fuller Museum this summer, but Covid has delayed the opening of the New England Sculptors Exhibit until spring 2021. It sits on a chunk of bedrock outside my studio. I’d love to send more casting work Zach’s way, so if you would be interested in a copy of Refuge for your own garden, let’s talk. 

Refuge, bronze, 2020

Refuge is a hopeful piece. The determined, young giraffe and the tireless turtle are unconcerned with the enormity of their mission. They echo the world’s need for us to engage, to bring our gifts, and to offer help in this time of great loss. It’s a collective dance we can’t do alone.

See Change

For those of you who live in the Greater Boston area, here’s something wonderful to see!  See Change is Studio Without Walls’ new exhibit of site-responsive sculpture along the Riverway Park in Brookline. The exhibit was to have opened in April but was postponed indefinitely because of Covid. Now, through the downright doggedness of its founder, Bette Ann Libby, and the willingness of the Brookline Parks and Open Spaces Department, it’s open to the public, free—and a pure delight! When Holly Cyganiewicz and I were installing our sculpture, A Tree Grows in Brookline, two fathers, both with children under three years old, stopped to chat. They walk this lovely oasis every day while on childcare duty. We’ll be back, they each said.

A Tree Grows in Brookline, Linda Hoffman and Holly Cyganiewicz; tree trunk with burl, painted curly willow branches

I was delighted to see Bob Shannahan’s life-size Mastodon and its Mother, made with alder and sumac branches, a sculpture exhibited at Old Frog Pond Farm last fall. And to find,Julie Lupien Nussbaum’s Alien Fishery, where she’s augmented the lone fish accompanying her sculpture Vodnik with Cruel Shoes also exhibited at the farm, and created a school of fish hanging from a high oak branch. If there’s a slight breeze, when you pause to watch, they turn as one body. Some sculptures in this family-friendly exhibit respond to the devastation of our planet, others to the need for justice and equality, and some captivate and offer hope for the future with their colors and shapes.

Studios Without Walls is a Brookline-based collaborative group of sculptors and conceptual artists who produce exhibitions of art in outdoor and public settings. Their commitment is to bring art to their community and educate audiences to appreciate and participate with outdoor sculpture. Photographs of this year’s installations, site maps, as well as treasure hunt clues are online at Studios Without Walls. Globe Correspondent Karen Campbell wrote in her glowing review, “With sculptures tailored to nestle in and around the trees, a leisurely amble offers a surprising visual treat of clever, substantive, thought-provoking art.”

Bllnkah II Liz Helfer; broken windshield glass

Brookline’s Parks and Open Space director said, “Brookline’s Studios Without Walls affirms the power of art to change your perspective.” The thirteen participating artists are Gail Jerauld Bos, Grey Held, Liz Helfer, Linda Hoffman and Holly Cyganiewicz, Janet Kawada, Bette Ann Libby, Julie Lupien Nussbaum, Madeleine Lord, Maria Ritz, Bob Shannahan, Marnie Sinclair, Allen M. Spivack, and Delanie Wise.

The exhibit is open through September 7, 2020. Wear your masks, stay six feet apart, and take a stroll along the Muddy River. The Longmont T stop will take you there and free parking is available on nearby streets.

Thank you Brookline Parks and Open Spaces, sponsors and supporters of Studios Without Walls, and especially the artists. We all want to “See Change”!!

Walking the Land: Returning Home

This “Man in a Maze” basket by the Akimei O’odham (Pima) people of Arizona is in the Fruitlands Museum collection in Harvard, Massachusetts. Though baskets like this are called, “Man in a Maze,” the design is actually a labyrinth, a teaching tool. Mazes have false turns and dead ends, and the sojourner must often retrace their steps and start over. A labyrinth is a continuous journey, a winding path with no wrong turns, no wrong decisions. The basket’s fine weave expresses stillness and balance, virtues that walking a labyrinth are said to restore.

In 2006, I installed an outdoor labyrinth for Fruitlands Museum inspired by the design of the Pima basket. I remembered this labyrinth while I was writing about our current situation—each of us isolated, walking our individual paths through the pandemic.

Walking the Labyrinth at Fruitlands Museum, 2005

For the Fruitlands’ labyrinth, I used round New England field stones placing them on a flat and grassy hillside. The measured concentric circles follow the contours of the land. Once the installation was completed, I wondered, what should we put in the center? A plant, a flower, a special stone? Nothing felt right, and I left it empty.

A question many people are asking is what the return to normal will look like. Many have discovered a new attentiveness in their daily lives—cooking special recipes, baking bread, taking long walks. And with this attentiveness, gratitude for what we do have naturally arises. The question is will we be able to carry this mindful pace with us as we re-enter the busy marketplace?

When walking a labyrinth, reaching the center is the goal. Perhaps, however, the return is more important. As we walk back out, we have the opportunity to consider what we have noticed along our journey. Quite possibly, we walk back out of the labyrinth with more confidence. We may feel the freedom of not worrying where we are going.

Some of us don’t want to return to normal; for isn’t normal what has polluted our rivers, clearcut our forests, and created social and economic inequality? We aren’t going to change the way international corporations operate—let alone our own government—in a few months, but we can make personal decisions about how we want to walk our labyrinth. Are we walking with attention and with gratitude, or are we hurrying, trying to get somewhere? Are we fully present to the moment of walking? We each have a path to walk, there is no other. We change our lives by what we bring to our walking, and the only thing we truly bring with us is our heartmind.

I see now why it was right to leave the center of the labyrinth at Fruitlands empty. There is a journey, but there is no goal to achieve, no pot of gold, no rainbow, no anything. We may be spiritual beings, but we are on a human path we each have to navigate. Let’s imagine the joy of walking. The labyrinth is no longer at Fruitlands, but I offer you a walk-through Louise Berliner’s poem inspired by it.

Journey 

Imagine the wind
Midwife to the basket
Seeds delivered to soil
Subversive act of survival

The seeds take root
Cattail willow devil’s claw
Call to the Pima women
Come gather split soak coil

The basket grows
Tells its story in pattern
Elder Brother in the maze
A journey to the center

The seed becomes artifact
Sold or bartered shipped carried
Arizona story going East
Against the traffic

Imagine the glaciers
Midwives to the landscape
Stones delivered from soil
Subversive act of survival

New England’s best crop
Schist granite fieldstone
Call to the hands of an artist
Come gather map place illuminate

The labyrinth grows
Tells its story in pattern
Any stranger may begin
A journey to the center

Imagine the artist
Midwife to the sculpture
What the hand made
The feet now travel

Scrap Wrenn

Artist Scrap Wrenn and her partner, Jo, arrived at the farm in time for a late dinner on Tuesday in a U-Haul truck from upstate New York. I was introduced to Scrap at Zen Mountain Monastery, where I am known by my Buddhist name, Shinji. I wrote to her shortly after our introduction,

            Hi Scrap,
We have an outdoor sculpture exhibit at the farm every fall . . . I know you are about to move into the monastery, but just thought I’d ask if you had a piece you might install here.
You can see the prior year’s work at oldfrogpondfarm.com under the tab for art.

Loved your stormy Instagram post!
               Shinji

Scrap posts on Instagram almost every day. Some posts become images she includes in large photographic collages of people and place—magnificent landscapes with hundreds of photographic moments in which we immerse ourselves and journey through. Scrap’s visual language is quick-moving and incantatory. It is like listening to a medieval chant where the polyphony of different voices weaves a tapestry of individual melodies as well as harmonizing together. We engage with the leaps and turnings as questions about the nature of reality and meanings seep into our consciousness. She recently installed an exhibit of these photo collages at the John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York. 

John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, (Scrap Wrenn far left)

Scrap is also a sculptor. Inside the large U-haul truck were four identical heavy metal objects, fabricated initially for an installation on Randall’s Island, New York City. On Scrap’s website she explains  Awakening Asylum was designed to commemorate both the General Slocum Steamship disaster (June 15, 1904) and Randall’s Island, an “Asylum” in the past for inebriates and the mentally ill.  

The location of the sculpture commemorated the ship’s Hell Gate waterway passage where it is thought that the steamship fire likely began. Due to faulty unregulated flotation devices and poor crew response times, over a thousand people perished in the Northern East River on their way to a Lutheran picnic excursion on the sound in Queens.

Awakening Asylum, Scrap Wrenn 

This installation has castings of flotation devices, wood beams suggestive of the old ship, and a collage in the center of the spiraling metal: it is complex and multi-layered. Scrap would be bringing to the farm only the fabricated metal now in four pieces. Sculptors often take apart old sculpture and reuse its materials. I like to re-purpose parts from sculptures in storage, drawn to pieces that I may not have finished my conversation with. Scrap had sent me photos of these four large elements early on. They made me think 'wings' or 'fins'. Though I had no idea what she would do with them, I trusted in the integrity of her artistic vision.

Scrap (left) and Jo.

On Wednesday morning, Scrap and Jo unloaded the U-Haul, loaded Blase's pick-up, and we drove around the pond to their site. That’s where I left them—with a digging bar and shovels, on a hot day. They worked till the Japanese bells sounded for lunch. Dirty, hot, and with two ‘wings’ installed, they went back to work with Holly Ciganiewicz, one of our farmers, and completed the installation just before five o’clock, when we planned to take a swim in Bear Hill Pond.

The working title is Ground Space. These four forms, dug deep into the earth, each rise like a whale’s dorsal fin and transform the space. When you walk among them, around them, or stand in the center, a curious energy also rises and surrounds you, as if walking in a biosphere. But I won’t say anymore. You have to experience it for yourself. Scrap Wrenn is one of the thirty-seven artists whose work will be on exhibit at the farm for our annual outdoor sculpture walk.

Around the Pond and through the Woods opens on Friday, September 7 and will be open to the public on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, 11—5 pm through October 7. If those times don't work for you, we can make other arrangements for your visit. For information about the exhibit and other fall events at the farm check out our website. I’m excited to share this year’s exhibit with you.