Join Me - A Prelude
galvanized steel wire and rod, galvanized wire mesh
45x33x8"
Join Me - A Prelude was conceived one night when I passed a local bar and saw an old fortuneteller giving a tarot reading to a young woman. Struck by the intensity of the fortuneteller's gaze, I returned to my studio wondering if I could create a wire portrait with the same depth. Seeing new potential in a sculpture I had recently started I added to the head, the body, table, and tarot cards of a fortune teller. Shortly after, I got word that a friend known for her tarot readings had passed. Suddenly the direction the sculpture was taking felt personal and prescient, inspiring me to truly take this work to the deeper place I had imagined.
As I worked, something unexpected became apparent, the more emotions I infused in the work, the less necessary it felt to add ‘fortune teller’ elements. Not sure what to do, I focused more on pushing the figure to be as three dimensional as the face. While the piece conveyed the idea of a fortune teller well, it lacked the depth of gaze that had inspired it.
Defeated, I retreated to my favorite bar. Surveying the dark room lit only by candles set on small tabletops I noticed how natural everyone looked, though only their faces were lit. It occurred to me how we only really get a deep look at the face of the person we are conversing with. The hands, arms, legs, and shoes of the person you are talking to go mostly unnoticed, they remain unremembered.
With that it clicked! I was thinking I had to sculpt the body and hands as three dimensional as the face, and as my encounter with the patrons of the bar revealed, this was not correct.
Going back to work with renewed resolve I took out all the unnecessary elements rendering with each pass the body less and less literal. Before me was that same deep gaze! It was as if the fortune teller had entered my neighborhood bar, met my eyes and sincerely asked: how are you?
Over the next six more months I worked, drawing on all my thirty years of sculpting experience. Working to harmonize the concave and convex angles of the sculpture as well as deliberately shaping the infinite number of shadows it can cast. With, what I came to call, Join Me - A Prelude I was sculpting not as things truly are, but as we see and experience them… This piece is the culmination of thirty years of effort to discover how deep I can take wire portraiture.
Join Me - A Prelude is the beginning of my attempt to offer the world my answer.