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Local sculptors share the meaning and method behind their work
Posted: Jul 18, 2008 in Things to do, Culture
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Ten towering sculptures will be on display in Indianapolis over the next nine months, following Tuesday's opening of "Chakaia Booker: Mass Transit," a public art exhibition created by the New York-based sculptor.
Booker's works are monumental and arresting, utilizing tires cut and shaped into lyrical yet powerful forms, and will surely demand your attention.
But there are a number of local female sculptors who similarly spend their days forming and re-working physical objects as a means of expression. These women cut, weld, carve, chisel, bludgeon and bend all manner of material to their will, using blowtorches, spinning wheels, glue guns and grinders.
And the work they create, which resists interpretation as much as it begs consideration, demands your attention, too. Their pieces ask you to look a little deeper, to consider the third dimension and to ponder the constructs behind each construction.
We spent a little time with four such Indianapolis artists to find out how they came to sculpting, what they put into it and what they get out of it.
D. DelReverda-Jennings
Creating physical expressions of a complex interior life
Materials: Metal, steel, stone, paint, paper, etc.
Price range: $500 to $40,000.
Contact: Call (317) 924-1582 or e-mail urbanedart@aol.com.
Where to find her work: Flava Fresh V, an annual mixed-media celebration, is currently at the Indianapolis Artsgarden. DelReverda-Jennings also shows new work every two months at regional galleries, including Dean Johnson, the Hoosier Salon and Broad Ripple Art & Design, among others.
A fan stirs the air on the porch of a Near-Northside home used by D. DelReverda-Jennings as a working space. Beads of sweat form on her neck.
Her hands, holding a paintbrush, are bedecked with silver rings, and the brush scurries over the pockmarked black plaster, giving the surface a faux-bronze depth.
"It's fascinating to me how all of the different textures I've created on this piece, when you paint on it, how it just makes it pop out and brings a lot of depth and differentness from within it," said DelReverda-Jennings, 50.
"When it's just black, it's just boring. Color changes it entirely."
More than color, DelReverda-Jennings changes her large sculptures -- made from various materials, including metal, stone and paper -- with glues, pliers, metal shears, drills and mallets.
A fine artist, but also a decorative one, she spent her early years in Alaska, where she was raised by her grandparents. She moved to Chicago at age 6, and came to Indianapolis at 11. Although she has taken art classes over the years, she is primarily self-taught.
"I was one of those freaky kids," DelReverda-Jennings said. "I think I was 4 years old, and I would go around to people's houses after they moved and I would collect all these colorful things -- blue Monopoly pieces or crayons or buttons -- and I would glue them together."
Once, she made a bracelet and earrings out of a "concoction" of water, paste and her grandmother's flour. ("Basically, I received a good behavioral adjustment for doing it," she said, laughing. "But I still wore it, and painted it with nail polish. I've always been an artist.")
DelReverda-Jennings' work, however, is anything but childish. With pieces like "Goddess Woman Root," part of a series titled "I'll Never Tell," her creations often speak to the pain and mistreatment of women, and "how people put the world upon them."
"Mental, emotional, verbal, physical or sexual abuse is an everyday occurrence in the lives of a large portion of the world's female population, and a segment of my work deals with this 'disease,'." she said. "A vast majority walk each day with this 'secret,' this 'silence,' hidden deep within. My work is an artistic expression that is free to exist as a symbol, or a warning -- a moment to transport away from fear to a place of calm and hope."
Sculpture, she said, is the perfect medium for communicating messages of this kind.
"It's something you can hold and touch. It's tactile. You can get better reactions. They have more questions. People want to know about each decision you've made," she said. "It brings me to others, my insides. You look different to some people, until they really get to know you."
Leanne Ellis
Ceramics artist shapes clay into meaning
Material: Clay.
Price range: $60 to $800.
Contact: Call (317) 259-7108 or e-mail jldse@comcast.net.
Where to see her work: One of Ellis' pieces was recently picked up by the Kinsey Institute, and she is working toward a show in Bloomington in the fall, and a show at the Herron School of Art & Design in August. Her work is also sold at The Bungalow, 924 E. Westfield Blvd., in Broad Ripple.
Leanne Ellis works in a true potter's studio -- a space with a layer of clay dust and smudged fingerprints coating everything from the throwing wheels to the chairs.
The fallout is unsurprising when you watch her work, wiping down the edges of one of her latest in a series of "Torso" sculptures. Ellis props clumps of dry paper underneath the slab of wet clay, to accentuate a woman's breast. She scores the skinlike surface, using her thumbnail, and then incises it with a sharp object.
The work seems lush and organic, appropriate given the wet Tuesday morning, the sodden leaves in the garden outside and the droplets of water making circles in her backyard fountain.
Ellis creates sporadically, sometimes every day when she is working on a project. Having a studio at home allows her to work studio time into family life. While waiting for a piece to set up, she can pop out to the grocery store, make dinner or weed that burgeoning garden.
Born and raised in Anderson, Ellis learned pottery at Indiana University and then became an apprentice before going to Ball State in 1974 to get an art degree. She started by making functional pottery, but her work has evolved into small to.mid-size sculptures in recent years -- the "Torsos" being the most prominent example. She started them after finding discarded plastic molds used as bikini mannequins at a Costco.
"I just couldn't throw them away, because, you know, it's a torso," Ellis said. "And I like working with the figure, and I was making some pieces that work in that area. I like to see.what will happen, not knowing exactly."
What often happens is a showcase of raw femininity. Ellis said the curvaceous female figure is the perfect canvas for creating narrative relationships between the human form and the landscape.
"Then there's a more nurturing, maternal, whole thumb-sucking thing," she said. "I've done some baby pieces, one with lactation. I do a lot of different things. I like things that have to do with the outside, so I incorporate nature and figures, and how I feel. Sometimes when I look at my pieces, I know I'll eventually see a common thread."
Julie Ball
Sculptor proves her mettle in works of metal
Materials: Stone, steel and wood.
Price range: $300 to $5,000.
Contact: Call (317) 253-0376 or e-mail julieball317@yahoo.com.
Where to see her work: Ball's work is owned by prominent private collectors. In addition to the piece at St. Luke's Methodist Church on 86th Street, the public can see Ball's work at Redeemer Presbyterian at 16th and Delaware streets. Her work will also be featured at the "Start With Art" luncheon at the Indiana Convention Center in September, and at various Indianapolis Arts Center events later in the year.
A bell chimed in the distance, and the artist (who barely looks to be in her mid-30s but is actually 50), started talking about maturation. Maturation of rust, that is.
On a hot day in June, Julie Ball put the final coat of sealer on a work she started more than a year ago, having allowed the rust to mature suitably through six months of exposure to the elements.
"The Tree of Life" -- a large piece commissioned by St. Luke's United Methodist Church -- finally was finished.
Ball stood wearing unassuming laceless brown shoes, gray shorts and a gray T-shirt, and pulled the shirt away from her, hoping cool air might rush up under the sweaty fabric.
"Given that I've been working in the theme of plant life and trees for the last six years, it fell right into my area of interest," she said, eyes running over the hulking work affixed to a brick wall in a courtyard.
"The Tree of Life, being that it represents something otherworldly and heavenly, I didn't want to show the entire thing. It would almost be like the challenge for an artist to paint the face of Christ."
Instead, Ball did what she has become an expert at doing, through years working as an artist and teaching at both the Indianapolis Art Center and Herron School of Art and Design, since she first became interested in sculpture as a teenager: She started with a drawing, abbreviating the tree to make the branches almost a crucifix, or perhaps a pair of arms reaching out.
From imagery, she moved on to process, working in her large home studio with a chain hoist, welder, blowtorch and table saw to marry stone and metal. A buffing pad gave the bronze parts a bark-like finish. A jagged lip on the edge of the steel described the rough edges of a tree. The rust allowed the natural to meet the fabricated. And the sunlight changes the work depending on time of day.
"You can really get into your work at times, and it's rather exhilarating to participate with that creative nature," said Ball, "and it becomes only better and deeper and stronger as you grow older."
Just like the depth of an orange belt of rust, maturing in the outdoors.
Carol Tabac-Shank
French artist savors reshaping steel
Material: Steel.
Price range: $150 to $18,000.
Contact: Call (317) 809-2648 or e-mail art@caroljourdan.com.
Where to see her work: Carol Tabac-Shank's studio, Suite B250 at the Stutz Business Center, 212 W. 10th St., is open from 1 to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, or by appointment. Her work also will be featured in the Indy Fringe Festival in August.
Sparks ricochet all over the studio floor, bouncing and dancing over the smooth concrete, as Carol Tabac-Shank leans over her bench grinder.
A thin metal pin keeps a scruff of brown hair from falling over the front of her helmet. Were it not for that little feminine flourish, Tabac-Shank, 38, might go up in flames.
As she finishes welding a piece of steel to the 1940s bi-plane she is constructing, she stops to explain what she enjoys about working with hot metal.
"Everything," she said, her French accent curving smoothly around each word. "I like the dust. I like the tools. Everything."
Born in Cannes in 1970 to a father who was a painter and a mother who was a designer, Tabac-Shank dabbled in the arts in Nice before moving to the United States in 2001, where a sculpting class in Miami hooked her on 115-volt wire welders, 15-inch drill presses, and that most French of all innovations: the guillotine. She was one of two women in the class.
"People will say, 'Do you weld? Do you do that? Did you make that? It's unusual to see a woman doing this,'." she said. "They're used to.seeing men, you know, with big muscles." Nevertheless, the petite brunette began cutting and contorting metal.
She moved to Indianapolis four years ago, having met her Hoosier husband in the Sunshine State, and has had a Stutz Building studio for three years now, working on her pieces -- both large and small -- one at.a time, whether a bull, a flag, a penis and testes, flowers or a biplane.
"Little by little you start to understand the metal," she said. "What will stick together -- what will melt."
Her heart is what usually melts. Selling a piece is bittersweet at best.
"It's a heartbreak," she said. "Always."
Chakaia Booker: Mass Transit
What: A public art exhibition featuring 10 large-scale tire sculptures by New York-based artist Chakaia Booker.
When: Tuesday through April 1. The exhibition's opening begins at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday in front of the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, 340 N. Senate Ave.
Where: Nine of the works will be in various locations Downtown; the 10th will be in ARTSPARK at the Indianapolis Art Center, 820 E. 67th St.
Cost: Free.
Info: www.paindy.org.
