A Copper Alliance Member
Copper in the Arts
Issue #26: June '09 - Cont'd
Carol B. Saylor: In Her Mind’s Eye
Artist Carol Saylor
Photograph by Rebecca Troutman
Saylor’s resourcefulness was seeded in her youngest years, growing up during World War II. Her mother was an artist and her father a businessman with a penchant for woodworking. With rubber and metal materials shuttled away for the war effort, the factories were busy fabricating warheads instead of children’s rubber dolls. Most of her first toys were made by her own hands.
“My parents gave us paper, my mother mixed paste with flour and water, and my brother built us a doll house,” Saylor remembers. “We had the freedom and followed our parents' example.”
In her adult life she was a painter and teacher at Abington Parks and Recreation in between raising five children and later, having three grandchildren. Her home is decorated with several watercolors, many of which were completed as her eyesight began to fail her.
“I would use one color at a time, or two, because I knew as a sighted person what happens to those colors,” she explains. Eventually her tunnel vision became darker. “Little by little it slipped away,” she says.
Saylor believes she has lost her eyesight due to RP, or “retinitis pigmentosa.” Additionally, she suffers from nerve deafness, but can communicate with the help of a strong hearing aid.
“When you’re blind people think you can’t do a lot of things, very simple things,” she explains. “For example, I wouldn't be standing on this train platform if I didn't know how to get on to the train!” she laughs.
Saylor often describes the moment she realized she could, and would, go on to make art once she lost her sight. She had been using one end of her studio with a lot of bright light for painting. Because it aggravated her eyes and back, she would often take breaks to work with a sculpture stand at the opposite end of her studio.
“I was working on a whole series of papier mache sculptures and it just hit me at once—I was working with my eyes closed,” she recalls. Saylor then knew she could go on to be totally blind. “Because all that matters is the ability to make art,” she says. “And I knew I could.”
Bronze sculpture by Carol Saylor
Photograph by Rebecca Troutman
“Vision is spiritual, it's your mind picking up the essence of things, the feeling of things, emotion of things,” says Saylor. “Seeing with your eyes is something else.”
Her very first sculptures in bronze were inspired by Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, which depicts six men who sacrificed their own lives for their entire village during the Hundred Years’ War. She had been taking an art class at the time and was particularly struck by the man in the back. The pose—the figure stooped over, pigeon-toed, with hands over his head in bracing agony—became her imagery to convey her feelings of impending blindness. She calls the recurring figure in her work Darkess.
Saylor currently has four pieces with bronze patinas on display through the month of April at Moss Rehab in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. But she is most eager for a two-person show with friend, retired opthalmologist and painter Dr. Richard Goldberg. Held at Villanova University in November of 2010, she will be exhibiting the largest tactile pieces she’s ever made, primarily sculpted of raku clay.
Her recent work has featured a series of large egg shapes that are meant to be touched. She often explores the space inside and adds pieces that are hard to see, but easily explored by curious hands. She believes that using a physical, tactile sense with her artwork without relying on eyesight gives an artist new meaning for the presence of their work. All it takes is practice, she insists.
"You're going to develop another level of sculpture, you're going to develop a mind's eye,” she says. “I don't like to get too corny, but as a blind person you really do pick up things that sighted people don't. It's the essence of people.”
Resources:
Carol Saylor, Roslyn, PA
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Syed Ahmad: Capturing Fluid Movement in Glass on Copper
Glass and copper work of Syed Ahmad
Photograph Courtesy of Syed Ahmad
What did consume his creative mind was a sense of water that pervaded his early days living along the Kedah River in Malaysia. Syed Ahmad sought to capture the flow and complexity of color that water presented through his work with art glass.
“When I first started out, like most glass users, I started making jewelry,” Ahmad says. “I learned about the medium from making jewelry. It's smaller. You can afford to make mistakes.”
His work with jewelry refined his technique, learning to combine different types of glass--clear, opaque, and dichroic—layering them for effect. This was something new to the field of art glass, especially the use of dichroic glass. Originally developed by NASA for spacesuit visors, satellite optics, and space shuttle windshields, this specialized clear glass is coated with many micro-layers of metal oxides that filter light differently than either clear or colored glass.
“Dichroic glass does not absorb light. It tunes light,” Ahmad explains. Since the word dichroic means “two colors,” this glass will reflect one color and let in a different color. And because it doesn't absorb light energy, the colors will not degrade but remain rich and true.
Dichroic glass, in combination with other types of glass, makes Ahmad's creations quite unique—and the fact that he works in large scale (some pieces are 20 x 24) and fires the glass before mounting. Though Ahmad knows his medium well, having working with it for fifteen years, he also knows that he can't control this medium totally and therefore plans for serendipity in each creation.
“In the medium I work in, you can't really muscle it. Everything has to be planned out, and you have to anticipate what's going to happen. After a while, you understand how the glass is going to flow,” he says. “When you do a few layers, you can predict better. If you do more layers, it's harder to predict. I try to predict what it's going to do, but sometimes--actually a lot of times--I don't really know. After awhile, you have to put it in the kiln, and let it go.”
Glass and copper work of Syed Ahmad
Photograph Courtesy of Syed Ahmad
Because Ahmad feels that each of his art glass creations, like water, needs something to contain it such as a bank or shore or vase, he mounts his work on metal, usually aluminum or copper.
“After a few years, I decided to try another metal, something warmer,” he says. “It would give a different feel altogether.” Copper became his next metal choice. “It turned out to be a really fun metal to work with because it's malleable. With acid, you can etch it and get a lot of patina. And, because it's soft, I can work it; I can hammer it; I can make different textures out of it.” He obtains both metals from industrial suppliers and his glass from a stain glass distributor.
From his studio in Salisbury, North Carolina, Syed Ahmad makes art glass creations for a number of individuals, usually people who found his work at art shows. About half of his income is from this commission work. They grace fine homes, businesses, and dentist offices. And one has been placed in a cancer clinic lobby, offering rich, bright colors and the soothing movement of water. His work has also garnered awards from Art Festivals across the country, including the Award of Excellence (Mixed Media) from the Port Warwick Art & Sculpture Festival in Newport News, Virginia, and Best in Category (Mixed Media 2D) from the Bethesda Row Arts Festival, Bethesda, Maryland.
Resources:
Syed Art Glass, 120 East Innes St., Salisbury NC, (704) 754-0670
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Transcendence through Copper
Bronze sculpture by Chris Lee
Photograph courtesy of Chris Lee
In 1984, Lee produced Nebular Hypothesis. Consisting predominantly of copper, the large multiple element sculpture was created specifically for the two-story lobby of a newly completed bank building in downtown San Diego. Suspended from the ceiling of the lobby at its greatest height, the work’s largest element consists of a long copper spiral that the artist cut from a quarter inch copper plate that he stretched by pulling on it with a forklift and finishing its surface with a sanding disk. At its highest end, the spiral embraces a large oxidized steel sphere then it descends to support a cone of laminated glass hovering over a pyramid formed of the same granite as the lobby’s floor. Reminiscent of a Galileo-like representation of the energy of the heavens, the work reflects the artist’s interest in engaging with the physical realities of the universe that surrounds him, and also something of its mysteries.
The copper elements that play a major role in works like Nebular Hypothesis take on a far less apparent role and serve as subtle enhancements in Lee’s well recognized works in which glass is the prominent material. His Spiral Tetrahedrons, for example, consists of a large number of plate glass disks layered one atop the other to form, along with the steel base, the sculpture’s overall shape. While the artist’s primary interest focuses on the effects of light emerging from the edges of the glass, he often inserts thin veneers of polished copper or brass at regular intervals between the glass disks to introduce barely discernable hints of warm color into the glinting, shimmering exterior of these works. Often, Lee will finish pieces of this type by capping them with a geometric structure formed of the same copper or brass he used within their glass body. Created in sizes ranging from tabletop pieces to outdoor monuments, sculptures of this general type are among the best known of Lee’s body of work and are seen in public and private spaces across the country.
The range of Lee’s body of work is apparent in The Focus. The sculpture consists of an eight foot burnished aluminum cone which supports a laminated glass sphere and a granite disk that serve as a base for a tree wrapped from its base to its branches in polished and coated copper leaf. Lee created the piece specifically for its location at the center of the glass enclosed, three story entry rotunda of a Kaiser-Permanente administrative facility in Anaheim, California. Sunlight enters the space, captured by numerous small prisms the artist has suspended at the ends of the copper tree’s branches. They generate dozens of constantly changing rainbow patterns which dance slowly across the walls and floor of the enclosing rotunda and give the space an aura of delight and serenity that serves to ease the anxieties and pressures that inevitably surround workers and staff involved in healthcare. In this, The Focus reflects more than Lee’s ability to relate physical form to physical context. It also reveals his embrace of the challenge to produce an art that can be useful in achieving important purposes; in this case, by creating a subtle and supportive environment for the care givers who daily tend to the sick and the suffering.
“For as long as I’ve been making art, copper has been one of my favorite materials,” Lee says. “It’s not just a metal, it’s an element, about as basic as you can get, and it’s been part of human experience for millennia. You can treat it so many different ways. You can beat it, you can knead it, you can bend it, you can stretch it, you can change its color. You can solder it, weld it, and melt it. Whatever you do, it’s still copper, with a natural beauty all its own. It adapts to its environment and complements a lot of other materials in its color, its expansion and contraction properties, and its oxidation properties. You can mix it with other metals and wind up with something altogether different. As a sculptor, as an artist, my palette would not be complete without it.”
Copper in the Arts: NEWS
Elegant Armor: The Art of Jewelry - June 04, 2009
Rocking Bottle, Susan Hamlet, 1987, Copper; fabricated, patinated
Photograph courtesy of MAD Museum
Elegant Armor is divided into four major themes: Sculptural Forms, Narrative Jewelry, Painted and Textured Surfaces, and the Radical Edge.Important examples of sculptural jewelry by pioneers in the studio jewelry movement include Art Smith’s 1948 brass neckpiece and Margaret de Patta’s surprising kinetic brooch from 1947.
American jewelry artists are especially renowned for the narrative content in their wearable pieces that tell a story, convey messages through signs and symbols, take sociopolitical positions, or include imagery inspired by nature or the human body. Pioneering American jewelry artist Sam Kramer’s 1958 Roc Pendant draws on elements from the subconscious. Verena Sieber-Fuchs commented on apartheid by using paper for wrapping fruit in South Africa in her visually arresting 1988 Apart-heid collar.
The reaction against using precious metals to gauge the worth of jewelry is crystallized by Otto Künzli who hid a gold ball inside a rubber sleeve for his famous Gold Makes You Blind bracelet. The opposite of conspicuous consumption, this icon of twentieth-century jewelry uses symbols and ideas to outrank the value of tangible things.
Many works in the Museum collection reflect the impact of technology on our lives. Mary Ann Scherr, a leader in the American studio jewelry movement, investigated the potential relationship between jewelry and medicine in her 1974 Electronic Oxygen Belt while Ulrike Bahrs combined the fine materials of gold, silver, and garnets with holography to create a mysterious fleeting image in her brooch. American innovator Stanley Lechtzin created other-worldly jewelry without touching it by using computer-aided design and manufacture in his 1999 Plus-Minus brooch, while Daniella Kerner made her 1999 Mag-Brooch with selective laser sintering in DuraFrom polymide joined by rare earth magnets.
An illustrated, full-color book accompanies the exhibition containing an insightful essay by curator of jewelry Ursula Ilse-Neuman and dazzling new photography of approximately two hundred pieces from MAD’s jewelry collection.
Resources:
MAD Museum, 2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY, (212) 299-7777
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