Ocean Side Pillar

Being back upon the shores of the Long Island Sound has resurfaced many emotions, perspectives, ideas, and, my favorite, materials. The winter has long been forgotten and the physical drive and energies of summer has overtaken. I have succumbed to them all and attempted to focus them neatly into another shoreline sculpture piece. The following piece is very similar to another I did a few years back upon the opposite shore of the continent while visiting Oregon. See photo below.

I try to frequent the boundary of our world and that of ocean life when I can spare a few hours after long days working on a farm out on the northern point of Long Island. These times are often full of refection and thought, but with my strong mental engine they can easily fill with poetry or, in this case, sculpture. Often I let the interest in materials that I discover spark ideas, which then come together while I do my best in building a final product. Surely, the process and findings change the end result, but always for the best. Positivity is a bountiful element.

(click photo for a larger image)

This piece was created upon two different visits a week apart. (Upon writing two weeks later, the piece is still standing despite 25 mph winds and high tide and is now accompanied by some other shoreline art from an unknown creator.) The first day of creation was an exhausting few hours of collecting the human cut stumps from various parts of the shore; the longest travel was about a quarter mile. Some were pushed along the smooth stones and some were floated in the shallow salt water. All of the elements weighed a great deal, far more than I could lift solely, but due to some ingenuity I was able to erect the pillar with patience and a bit of muscle.

The second visit was the tedious act of collecting the smooth gray-black stones. While slumped over the beach quickly darting my hands about for the only tone I was in search of I had a silly realization. In the time that I had taken away from farm work, which demands high physical labor and minute tasks, I had chosen to create an art piece that uses those exact traits. The morning before collecting the black stones to create the base (roughly two feet thick) I was picking strawberries much earlier than most people rise. The same mental game was being played out: ignore all shapes and colors, but small red droplets. Again, just a half a day later, I was ignoring all shapes and colors, but off-black ellipses. I wasn’t sure the conclusion of such a realization, but in many instances of life we do similar movement that we find tedious and possibly daunting, but in a different light we can find them meditative and introspective.

The final piece stands about nine feet tall or so with a base of about four and half wide. Each stump was obviously cut from different trees and different species. My concept was to reconstruct a strong trunk-like pillar from pieces of weathered driftwood that humans have chosen to discard. I enjoy what the ocean and wind have done to each article. I was lucky enough to find such great material even though they were a bit distant from each other, but think of how far they must have traveled to even arrive in the same general location. I spent a great deal of time positioning each stump to have the final composition appear tilted, but still sturdy. I wanted to stay true to the inconsistency and asymmetry of appearance found in the growth of all flora. With the positioning of their weights and surfaces I finally found a fit for each piece to stand strong on its own and, at the same time, assist the overall structure.

This piece was a taxing labor of handling the large material that was once important to a whole (a living tree), but exquisite and monumental paired with other similar selections. The concept can travel deeper mimicking our species attempting to re-bandage nature after we have taken such liberty with its destruction. Like all of my natural sculptural pieces I let the tides and the winds tatter and tear what I have created, much like the natural world we live in, whether we choose to realize it or not, also does.

*This piece was located just forty feet from a prior piece title The Structure, which has not one trace left.