“If there’s been a theme throughout my career as an artist and administrator it’s been to act, to solve problems quickly, and to embrace the complexity of things.”
How did you get started as a maker?
I grew up in it: my dad is a painter and a builder, my grandfather ran a sawmill and had a custom woodshop, my uncles are engineers, and my mom is a scientist and a lawyer. One of the most interesting, formative experiences for me was building geodesic domes with my family. Between the ages of 8 and 13, we would move to a client location, live there for 6-8 months, start with an empty site, and build the entire dome. I loved it. We did everything: ran backhoes, poured concrete and laid block, erected the dome and framed floors and walls, hung sheetrock, painted, roofed, and finished them so they were ready to live in. The coolest part was when the dome would arrive from a company in Oregon. It was a big kit: we would unpack the crates and then bolt together huge wooden triangles into hexagons and pentagons on the ground. Then a crane would lift them into place, we would bolt them together, and in one day, we would go from truckloads of parts to a freestanding shell.
Coming into the BFA art program at the University of Kentucky (UK), I had a great grasp of wood working processes and physical assemblage. I wanted to explore my enjoyment of building in real space and solving those kinds of complex problems. The professors at UK, Jack Gron and Garry Bibbs, introduced me to welding, steel fabrication, mold making and metal casting (bronze, iron), and forging. Working with metal is harder to do than working with wood, but I love it because it’s the only media that will withstand heating, beating, and twisting and still be beautiful and strong.
That was just the beginning of your journey as a sculptor. When did you feel like your artistic vision gained cohesion?
The gumbo really started to boil during grad school at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in my late 20’s. I fused touring as a musician and a concert sound & lighting tech, metal fabrication and casting, and a formative idea that emerged from customizing off-road trucks: “performance.” In all these experiences, I was building things and then pushing them to their limits. For my MFA, I built the Devil’s Night Ironworks foundry for performance iron casting events. It’s an environment for a very specific purpose – a work of art that begets other works of art. There is a certain spectacle to pouring molds that are explosive and volatile, but the point is to show how human interactions, our relationship with fire, and creativity come together to satisfy our need for rendering materials. The Devil’s Night Ironworks is installed at Sculpture Trails Outdoor Museum outside of Bloomington, Indiana and I’ll be performing with it this year. Gotta do something epic to mark the end of the world for 2012.
A tragic work accident in 2002 meant that you had to change your methods as metalworking sculptor. Would you elaborate on that experience?
After finishing my MFA, I was looking for work and had heard about Bob Cassilly and his City Museum in St. Louis. I took my son Seth on a Friday afternoon, met Bob, and started working the following Monday: I just jumped into it and was there for a three years with my own crew. Bob was an incredible sculptor and a really inventive person. He died in 2011. He and a crew of artists and craftspeople began transforming the International Shoe Company building into the City Museum. It is a huge playground and exploratorium, but for us it was a place to build with every kind of industrial, architectural and cultural detritus imaginable. Working for him was an amazingly organic process: he’d come in the morning and say, ‘I want people up there’, point at a pile of material or a plane on the back of a truck, and at the end of the day we had built something else amazing. I knew this is where I wanted to stay for the rest of my life.
In December 2002, my assistant and I were working on a big 10-foot climber. For a while, a lot of what I built was hour upon hour of bending solid bars and welding them into strange net patterns, tubes, and bubbles. I was bending a big piece of bar in place to weld and the steel I was standing on was dusty and slick. At the hardest part of the bend, my feet slipped and I lost control of the bar: it whipped my back and slammed it so hard that I ruptured three discs. I kept working, medicated, but after another year, I reached my limit. My legs didn’t work and I just couldn’t do the work there anymore. It was horrible. The creative work I loved was ripped away and the treatment for the pain, the narcotic meds, etc., was crippling. After another year, I got mad and quit everything cold-turkey. It took less invasive ways to rehabilitate myself physically, but the pain never goes away, even now. I’m broken.
How did you end up at the Conn Center?
It was pretty obvious that I had to change careers or continue to re-injure myself. Being a sculptor is hands-on and intense, or at least, that’s the way I’m interested in doing it. But I’m also a decent writer and had written a lot of grants as an artist. The director of the Brown Cancer Center at UofL, Dr. Don Miller, invited me to work as a technical writer and editor with the Center’s researchers. During my work there from 2005-2009, I helped scientists write so their language could clarify their ideas to receive more funding. I also teamed with Dr. Mahendra Sunkara from UofL’s Speed School of Engineering on a grant as the Conn Center was forming in early 2010. He was named interim director and was looking for an assistant director with planning and logistic skills, grant writing, and communications experience, and the willingness to help the center grow. It’s been a wonderful fit.
What outlets have you found in order to continue to be able to creative?
Since I couldn’t handle heavy materials or strenuous activity, I adopted lightweight methods of making at a small scale. I built assemblage pieces with things I had at home: pill bottles, plastic Halloween skulls, cereal box cardboard, and trash held together with hot glue, but worked with the skills I had with metal. Since they only weighed a few pounds, I could sit at my dining room table and have a way to continue to make art without it hurting me. As each piece was finished, I would cast it in iron with help from other artists until I could do it on my own, all the while taking photographs, painting, and using the casting process for effigy performances. I did more work with wood, and a lot with dirt and rocks in earthwork installations, anything I could tolerate really.
For content, I try to give some form to how it feels as all these pains shoot through my body all the time, infuse that frustration and deficit, but be defiant about it. I had long suffered with translating these sensations as a pain patient to my doctors and the effect they have on me. Y’know, they give you a shadow figure of a human and tell you to put an X where it hurts. It hurts everywhere and it’s making me insane! From that inadequacy came an avenue for expressing something visceral, the constant agony of chronic pain, but also its twisted irony, harsh beauty, and seething clarity. From 2004 – 2010, I made 17 of these “Pain Trophies” to celebrate the struggle of continuing to live through pain and its madness.
I’m getting stronger, or more stubborn, not sure which, but I keep composing with those ideas and taking advantage of overlooked and outmoded resources. Now it’s with woodcarving using chainsaws, larger scale earthworks and paintings, some steel work, and always with iron casting and performances. After working with recycled materials, everything seems so ripe, so loaded with potential as material. There’s so much around us that’s been designed and produced for specific purposes, but what happens when the original purpose is spent? That question formed another layer in my work that the City Museum residency and my injuries seemed to inflame: how to challenge this notion of constantly needing to ingest that seems to define us as a people? Even in my own life, I thought that my utility had been undone as an artist – hell, as a person! – so the challenges of finding a purpose, exercising free will, and having a voice mean everything. How do I repurpose myself? I keep doing that as an artist and a writer, and now as assistant director at the Conn Center, but it really comes from fighting a devolving view of my utility and how to live with that. Like Ali says, ‘float and sting…’
–Grace Simrall
Bio:
Sculptor. Grant Writer. Serves on the Board of Directors for Josephine Sculpture Park in Frankfort, KY.
Title:
Assistant Director, Conn Center for Renewable Energy Research, University of Louisville
Age:
40
Location:
Belknap/Deer Park
Contact:
lucky.7arts@gmail.com
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