PNWS

Andy Kennedy Hosts Sculptors Group

About twenty Pacific Northwest Sculptors group members and guests gathered at the home of fellow sculptor Andy Kennedy and his partner Stephanie Buddenbaum on the evening of October 19th for the group’s monthly informal get-together.

A different member artist hosts the gathering each month.

The potluck affair began with time to get reacquainted before everyone moved on to Kennedy’s studio out back. The studio is a converted garage teeming with hundreds of clay sculptures, large and small. Kennedy spoke informally about his work, saying he has “been doing raw expression in paint and clay for years,” since the late 1980s at The Evergreen State College at Olympia, Wash, where he completed a bachelor of arts program.

“Raw” is an apt description of many, if not most, of Kennedy’s sculptures on display in his studio. They are evocative of an experience he described at Evergreen in which he created drawings from photographs of dissected cadavers.

Most of his human-form sculptures—nearly all of the large body of work in his studio is human form—possess not an unsettling quality but an aura of “one step beyond,” a view of what it is like on the other side of where we are.

Kennedy describes this in another way on his website, “Objects that inform by asking the unanswerable.” Saying that “we should all draw more,” a remark that elicited a collective murmur of agreement from the room full of sculptors, Kennedy went on to share more of his 2-D work besides the cadaver drawings at Evergreen.

Interactivity Encouraged at Sculptors Group

In his slide show, he shared examples from a mostly pastel chalk series he called “missing children drawings,” adapted from images of missing children reproduced on milk cartons in a 1980’s nationwide awareness campaign about kidnapped children. Later, he created a public installation about the missing children. Besides working in clay, Kennedy also hand-builds in concrete on armatures, sometimes adding features in wood.

He has created several larger-scale outdoor installations in concrete, “yard sculptures” that, over time, are cloaked in vegetation and become integral with the environment they inhabit.

To learn more about Pacific Northwest Sculptors group events, contact us today!

Myles de Bastion Sculpts with Light – Interactive Art Installations

About 25 PNWS members and guests gathered at the southeast Portland studio of PNWS member and board director Shelly Durica-Laiche on June 15 for an evening of connection and exploration of another artist’s interactive art installations.

In a departure from the usual format of these events, Durica-Laiche chose not to share her work, but, instead, that of fellow artist Myles de Bastion whose work space occupies the same building as Durica-Laiche’s studio.

De Bastion is not a sculptor in the traditional sense and may not call himself a sculptor. Still, his work is three-dimensional and possibly more. De Bastion, who is deaf and also a musician, works with sound and light. Specifically, he creates electronic devices that transform sound that he cannot hear into light and vibration that he can experience.

The most striking example of his interactive art installations on display was an upright piano that he had transformed into a light-generating device. He demonstrated at the keyboard, playing chords that were simultaneously transformed into rich rivers of flowing color on a grid of light-emitting diodes that he had installed where the piano’s front panel used to be.

Discovering Music in LED Interactive Art Installations

De Bastion’s audience was rapt, and a number of them later tried their hands at the keyboard. The LED piano was previously displayed in the main lobby of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland where visitors to its 2015-16 “Guitars: Science of Sound” exhibit also could play the piano and visualize sound.

De Bastion’s creative work with technology is part of a larger creative mission. As the founder and president of the nonprofit organization, he calls CymaSpace, he is committed, in the words of the CymaSpace web site, to “making cultural events inclusive for the deaf and hard of hearing.” His workspace is also a performance space for the kind of inclusive events he produces.

De Bastion has dual citizenship in the United States and the United Kingdom. He grew up in England where he graduated from college with a degree focusing on computer science and animation. Although deaf, he has a life-long interest in music. At university, he was chairman of the Musician’s Society for two years.

After settling in Portland, de Bastion was motivated to create CymaSpace. In the words of CymaSpace.org, “as a musician and visual interaction designer who also happens to be deaf, he experienced first-hand the challenge of participating in a world that for the most part takes for granted the accessibility of sound. “

CymaSpace aims to create bridges between the deaf and the hearing in a positive way that opens doors for underserved minorities, changes misconceptions about deafness, and strives to make a real, socio-economic difference. Through its work, it shows that everyone benefits by lowering barriers that prevent equal access to art and culture.

CymaSpace focuses on making cultural events inclusive for the deaf and hard of hearing. They develop art and performances that largely feature the synergy of sound, light, and vibration. The organization takes its name from cymatics, a term derived from the Greek word meaning “wave,” as in sound wave or sine wave.

To learn more about Pacific Northwest Sculptors events, contact us today!

Clay Sculpting Through the Eyes of the Blind

A YouTube video of Edmonds, Wash., sculptor, and PNWS member Pam Mummy at work clay sculpting was released by its creator in November and has since “gone viral” with over eleven million views as of Dec. 26.

What makes the video so interesting is that the three head-and-shoulder sculptures Mummy created for the project were based solely on verbal descriptions of each subject by a loved one who happened to be blind.

The video, created last summer, is the project of Cut.com, a Seattle-based video production company that found Mummy through PNWS. “The crew came to my studio and set up lighting and lots of cameras for the film,” said Mummy. “Three blind people were chosen for the project, and each had lost their vision in about the past 15 years.”

Mummy said she would start with a skull shape and begin the sculpture as each person started to describe their loved one.

One of the blind persons taking part was a woman who described her son and had not touched his face for years until the day before she sat down with Mummy. “She felt it didn’t matter how people looked and her son did not particularly like to be touched,” said Mummy.

It’s All in the Clay Sculpting Details

The second person was a woman who described her assistant, whose face she had never touched until the week before the clay sculpting session. The woman had never asked to touch the other’s face “because she had felt she knew just how she looked,” according to Mummy. “She was correct. She was very aware of every detail of her face.”

The third participant was a man who touched his wife’s face often and, said Mummy, he “was very good at describing how she looked. His approach was very mathematical and (he) had used his hand to measure the distances of her face. He had been an engineer.” Mummy said it took two full days to record the video and that “it was fascinating to be involved in the production.” The husband and wife pair asked to keep their sculpture; the other two were destroyed.

Mummy said it was “like sculpting in the sand; they weren’t meant to survive.” Besides being viewed widely on YouTube, a story about the video also appeared in the Daily Mail of London. One YouTube viewer of the video suggested in a comment that next time the video-maker “should blindfold a sculptor and make them feel a model’s face and sculpt it.” View the video online at https://youtu. be/xkVaSXAu5vY. Learn more about Pam Mummy online at http://pmummy. com.

To learn more about Pacific Northwest Sculptors events, contact us today!