As promised, the weekend at the river was gorgeous. I spent the greater part of Sunday in the sun and being absorbed by my absurd art form. The willow leaves that hadn’t already dropped to the ground were now more yellow than green. Autumn is a fragile season at the Falls. If you blink you can miss it and I wanted to place a figure in this setting before that happened. I moved to my studio spot and created this guy from materials I had gathered previously and snapped these images.
Here’s Willie’s head in my hand. I started with an odd-shaped hunk of weathered Styrofoam and fished out some bobbers from my bag to use for eyes. As you can see, they don’t exactly match, but they work with the form and make it more expressive. The mouth is a piece of red plastic and I’m not sure what the nose was in a previous life. Maybe you do?
While I worked on my figure, I wasn’t completely alone. This handsome gray squirrel decided that I posed no threat and sat on the opposite end of the same log I was sitting on! None of my movements seemed to concern it and so I kept doing what I was doing and it did the same. I have had the feeling on more than one occasion that animals reveal their presence to me. Connecting with life in those moments is a truly magical and intimate experience. If that happened to more people regularly, there would be no question about falling in love with nature or the need to preserve it.
The chunk of Styrofoam I selected for the body was really flawed and split easily. I was barely able to get the legs in before the whole piece started falling apart. I picked a spot that had all these other “elements” to it and gingerly stuck the sculpture into the wet sand. When I categorize my work as being “absurd”, it is meant to refer to more than just the figures. Coming across a stretch of the Ohio River that has several tires, plastic barrels, and rusted-out water heaters along it is equally ridiculous. The figures I make help create focal points at particular sites and remind people that this kind of callous treatment of a precious resource is something no other animal would think of doing.
I left this figure standing next to the debris and returned to my studio under the willows. I have long come to the realization that try as I might, I just can’t take all this trash with me. I have enough river-turned Styrofoam at home to continue this project for a couple of years. By leaving a work every once in a while I hope that visitors will get the idea that some measure of creativity is required to address the pollution dilemma and that this creativity potentially resides in everyone. And since I consider the river to be a co-creator in this artwork, there’s probably some karmic significance to letting the water have the last word every now and then.
Artist at Exit 0 Riverblog 