I’m working on building a new sculpture as an artist in residence with Socrates Sculpture Park this year. This is the first of a series of studio notes about this project in progress.
Bellwether is a practical structure and a call to action. Inspired by Pete Seeger’s “Hammer Song,” it is an investigation of the “hammer of justice” and the “bell of freedom” as physical realities. The installation features a steel armature reminiscent of galvanized pipe playground jungle gyms, supporting a series of visceral ceramic bells. These forms are sites of encounter: working with local communities and public school students, Robinson employs maiolica glazes—a tradition dating back 2,000 years to Persia that has been adapted by cultures from Italy to the Americas. Each culture made this glazing tradition their own; here, it becomes a gesture of active welcoming. By inviting New Yorkers to apply their own marks to the white base glaze, the project becomes an embodiment of what it means to create something new together. Bellwether is a small, deliberate action intended to bring a diverse city together through the radical act of making.
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A concept drawing for a large curtain wall grid with ceramic sculptural bell forms. Situated along the coast of the East River at Hell Gate, in Socrates Sculpture Park, Astoria, Queens, New York City.
An excerpt from my proposal
“Bellwether begins as a visual and spatial proposition: a field of suspended ceramic bells held within a modular framework of galvanized steel pipe. The structure is open and linear, recalling scaffolding, playground frames, or the exposed grammars of modernist sculpture. Within this ordered armature hangs a shifting constellation of ceramic forms, each bell distinct in contour and surface. Air currents and human movement set them gently in motion, producing a dispersed, multi-tonal soundscape. The work reads first as a dialogue between the industrial and the handmade—between system and touch.
The sculpture is built through an intentionally collective craft process. Clay bells are formed in multiple forming methods from the pottery wheel, to press mold, slab forming and then altering each shape by hand so that no two are identical. They are finished using maiolica, a historic ceramic technique in which an opaque white glaze creates a smooth, luminous ground for painting. Over this satin white surface, cobalt blue marks and motifs are applied before firing. The resulting blue-on-white surfaces carry the memory of a vast migratory history of ceramics, a lineage that moved from the Islamic world into Europe and across the Atlantic through trade, colonization, and exchange. In Bellwether, maiolica functions not as style but as archive—material evidence that culture is always formed through contact and movement.”
Project Notes
Working on site at the park, things are bound to change. I’ve become comfortable with responding to the life and peculiarities of a site. The ground hogs, the mosquitos! the constant stream of curious neighbors and their dogs gleefully happy to visit a patch of green in an otherwise industrial pocket of Queens. This little park is an oasis, and the folks at the park, Sara, Andrew, Duke, Terrance, Shaun, et al, turned me on to the nuances, and variations from a shadey and quiet grove of trees, a Willow tree wilting in the summer sun, and drinking up the water soaked field that is prone to flooding when it rains. Being on site, reminded me of the first artist I was lucky enough to help out when I moved to NYC in 1992. Judy Pfaff was commissioned to create Corpo Onbrosso, a site specific installation in the at that time, new Rotunda Gallery (now the BRIC Arts, Gallery). And I watched her enter a white cube of a gallery designed by the architects Smith-Miller + Hawkinson. I mention this, because as I find myself on site, and in conversation with the people and the place, I am reminded of how Judy came into a space, and looked, and listened, and began to draw with steel, and materials, to create the most magical space, that I had the good fortune to sit inside of each week over the course of that inaugural exhibition. Now I find myself with my first site specific public sculpture project, and thinking about what I learned from Judy. To look, and list, and meander around this park, and I always go back to the grove of trees, where there is a naturally formed circle of trees covered in a light canopy. I love the coolness of the air there, and the way the light filters through the leaves. The river breeze moves softly through the this little orchard. I can imagine that breeze passing through this structure, and catching clappers and making a soft clunk of wood on ceramic. And so I’ve been thinking about circles as I am cutting metal, and wrestling with bending pipes over in the sculpture studio at the park.
Here are a some CAD sketches of the direction I am moving toward, a structure that feels like the original jungle gyms that inspired me as a kid climbing around the playgrounds back in the 1970s.
It’s now time for me to return to work in the studio. More to come soon. In the mean time come visit us over at Socrates Sculpture Park.