Capturing Gesture
Text: Ian Findlay—World Sculpture News Autumn 2010
Photos: Galerie Ora-Ora
The art of young American sculptor Will Clift speaks to the unique complexity of balance, gravity, and space. His works are powerful evocations of gesture, from waving branches to suggested flight, from sultry human forms to powerful abstract forms embracing space. While the works retain many of the fragile and ephemeral qualities found in nature’s most elegant forms, there is, too a robust reality.
Nature provides such an abundance of imagery and creative challenges that it would take countless lifetimes even for the finest artist to exhaust all possibilities. Artists down the ages, from painters and poets to composers and novelists, from photographers to sculptors, have understood this only too well. Fine artists understand that while success with nature as their muse is bountiful, it is but fleeting at best. The young American sculptor Will Clift has had to come to terms with this reality in each new series that he has made since his first major sculptures in wood more than a decade ago.
Will Clift, who was born in 1978, and whose father William Clift is a noted landscape photographer, grew up around the desert near Santa Fe, New Mexico, and so came to the magical desert forms and wood as a medium at a very early age both as an aspiring sculptor and designer. Growing up in the desert around Santa Fe not only gave Clift an intimate knowledge of the natural aesthetic and the vagaries of the desert’s craggy terrain and its flora and fauna, but it also lent itself to the very real practical experience of dealing with it and turning it to suit his own aesthetic vision, one that is captivated by the intersection of balance and gesture. As he said in an interview in 2009: “My childhood was spent in rural New Mexico—exploring arroyos, turning over rock, getting dirty, cut-up, and bruised.”[1] From this one might expect bold and rugged sculpture and not the gentle, almost delicately ephemeral works that he makes, which the critic Dottie Indyke once described as “fragile, willowy.”[2]
Using diverse woods—including mahogany, black walnut, padauk, maple, wenge (an African hardwood), teak, and lyptus—Clift has made sculptures through which he challenges the boundaries of balance, space, and gravity as well as his materials’ potential for strong forms and gestures. “I have worked with wood all my life, I like the tactility of it because it is organic it has a connection with the outside world, the real world. [In a way] the material itself is much less important because the wood is an intermediary; my media are balance, space, gravity. Balance to me is the intersection of form and gravity. This is the essence of all sculpture. Every sculpture has to address the quality of balance.”[3]
The subtle grace and power of Clift’s slim forms are enhanced to a remarkable degree by the reality that he never uses nails, pegs, screws or glue with which to join his varied simple, economical lengths of wood. Without plinths Clift’s works appear to be growing out of whatever surface they are attached to at the time. Clift’s art is also informed by a keen and articulate intelligence, honed at home and as an undergraduate and graduate student at Stanford University almost a decade ago. One sees in his forms something of the stripped-down nature of the desert, where a lone tree has been shorn of its leaves, shaped by the hot wind, sun, and rain. His spare forms are economical in their gesture, and remind one of slight human forms gliding across one’s peripheral vision as if carried by a brisk breeze. Clift does for the desert and sculpture in wood what the emient novelist Cormac McCarthy does for the desert and literature with his magical pared-down prose.
From such early solo exhibitions as Fourteen Sculptures (2003) and Gestures in Balance (2006) at Sanata Fe’s Photo Eye Gallery and Gerald Peters Gallery, respectively, to his most recent exhibition Gestures (2010), at Hong Kong’s Galerie Ora-Ora, Clift has walked the treacherous artistic path between manufactured beauty and a bold, independent vision. While he does not reject obvious beauty with its roots in nature, Clift holds to a vision in which the natural world and man-made gesture teeter precariously between subtle strength and weightless fragility, even delicacy.
The birth of Clift’s works is in his drawings, integral to the preparation of any work. Drawing focuses the mind, helps to encapsulate ideas on balance, tension, rhythm, gesture, and narrative of space embraced by a work or surrounding it. Drawing is also a means of discovery. As Clift describes the process, this becomes clear: “The shapes in my sculptures come from the world around me. I begin each by sketching on paper, gradually refining it. The drawn quality persists in the finished piece, a sense of its two-dimensional roots. By the time that I am ready to fabricate the final work, the form’s original inspiration has become irrelevant to me, and may not be recognizable. Similarly, I see the physical material that I work with only as a means to express an idea. The balance within each work comes entirely from intuition as I draw the form, as opposed to trial-and-error or engineering of any sort. Each sculpture must balance on its own—this is crucial to me—but for added security I add non-structural removal pins to ensure that the parts remain in the right relationship to each other, and to keep the work secure as it is displayed.”[4]
However one may view Will Clift’s sculptures, from the dangerously fragile to the dynamically elegant and sensitively open, there is always the reality that they are physical entities that were hand-made. Clift, who is superbly articulate about his art and his processes, is also a very physical person, so it is no surprised that however fragile his work may seem, it is not sentimental but represents an intuitive part of the artist.
There is an intense manner about him when he articulates his ideas about cutting and shaping, matching each wood’s physical properties such as colour and grain, about creating gesture and working with the intricacies of balance that is striking and suggests a man completely in tune with the intellectual and physical aspects of his art.
“Yes, I am very physical as a person because I enjoy the world. It is part of my way of experiencing the world that is by diving in. [And my work] physically doesn’t always mean mass. Physicality can by nuance, subtlety. I try to find that line between mass and fragility, which is another aspect of balance. One could also say that my work is about vulnerability.”
“I am trying to tap into balance—it is inherent in all of us. It is a way to connect with the world and with people. [It connects] with people because we have the experience of balance and it is a way of connecting with the viewer that is a puer physical way, that is not intellectual but deeper than intellectual.”[5]
Perhaps in line with these thoughts, Cllift does not impose normal titles on his artworks. His titles describe: Two Round Forms, Stacked (2008), Enclosing Form, Low and Horizontal (2008), Three Twisting Verticals (2009), Three Simple Curves (2009), Over and Under, Suspended (2010), Enclosing Form, Reaching Over (2010), and Suspended and Standing (2010). The arcing simplicity of his art and the simple and clear gestures of each highlights Clift’s sparse desert reality. “Sparseness is a reality of the desert. In the desert nature strips away, down to the essentials.”[6] Continuing this sparse reality has lent Clift’s work a unique certainty and a wonderful range of images appear from a simple landscape to a sensual dance, from a suggestive languorous nude or simply a generous abstraction.
A look across Clift’s oeurve reinforces not only the view that his artistic commitment is the essential belief in the power of nature to inspire but also that through sculpture the artist can express even the most personal statements about himself far beyond the power of words. In doing so Clift crosses, recrosses, and connects many limits of perception and balance, tension and space, form and geometry.
In 2003, Timothy Anglin Burgard, curator of American art, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, said: “Will Clift’s objects walk a fine line, exploring and refining the boundary between three-dimensional drawing. In a delicate balancing act, their arcing arabesques evoke the contours of landscapes or human forms, yet their open-ended silhouettes, in which form and void are conjoined, avoid definitive delineation. Instead, their intersecting and tapering lines, like branches blown by the wind, animate the surrounding space and make manifest the motion that is everywhere present.” Burgard’s comments are as true today as they were when they were first uttered.
Clift, who is a self-taught artist, captures gesture in the sculptures with seeming ease. This is a gift of the truly talented artist, but it is also one born of hard work and keen intelligence. In Clift’s case, his art is also informed by his studies in psychology and engineering, as well a nod to Japanese culture with which he has an intimate knowledge. Indeed in works such as Over and Under, Suspended and Three Twisting Verticals one sees a calligraphic influence. At the same time, Clift’s two-dimensional drawings of the human body and other forms are now three-dimensional realities. While there is no overt sexuality present in his art, there is something quietly erotic in a number of works. Over and Under, Suspended is a good example. Its form is that of a lady’s thigh and outstretched leg, reminiscent of the languorous nude paintings by Philip Pearlstein from the early 1980s.
Each wood has its own personality according to Clift, and as such dictates much of the character, strength, and gestures of his works. In making each work Clift is attempting to bring together many disparate elements into a whole that will not only engage the eye by also inspire imagination and intellectual questioning. He says that he is “looking for a balance between intellect, feeling, and body; trying to bring them all together in my life and work.”
One sees this clearly in such beautiful gestural works as Two Round Forms, Stacked, Enclosing Form, Low and Horizontal, Three Simple Curves, Enclosing Form, Reaching Over, and Four Pieces Out and Down (2009). Each work embraces space with its line yet floats freely and is embraced by space in turn. What one is looking at is harmony. Here is a sense of motion and gesture that comes together so powerfully in the works of sculptors such as Richard Serra, Alberto Giacometti, and Alexander Calder. These artists have greatly inspired Clift to come to grips with emotion, questions of mass and weight, the subtlety of human and nature’s gestures as well as gravity and balance. There are times when one is afraid that a work will lose its balance, but this is a mere trembling of anticipation. Clift is such a skilled artist that it will not happen.
Whether Clift is suggesting the sensuality of the human figure as in Over and Under Suspended or the elegance of dance as in Three Twisting Verticals or the power of flight as in Four Pieces Out and Down, one is always aware of the exquisite tension of gesture and form, balance and judicious symmetry. Nothing is out of place, for as Clift says. “I use form, gravity, and balance to create work that evokes harmony and uncertainty at the same time. No part is extraneous or redundant. I see balance as the tension between order and chaos, between motion and stillness. I want to give a physical presence to the effect of gravity and balance on form. At the same time, I want to use lightness and whimsy to give my work a sense of life, an apparent effortlessness.”
Will Clift’s lyrical works, all of which have nature as their muse, captivate because they open up one’s imagination. Clift gives us the barest forms with which to work our minds, yet he unleashes such rich imaginings in us.
Notes:
[1] From, Will Clift, in Sculptors of the Rockies, 2009
[2] Review, “Will Clift,” by Dottie Indyke, ARTnews, January 2004, page 142.
[3] Unless otherwise stated all quotations from the artist are taken from an interview with the author in Hong Kong on December 11, 2010.
[4] Artist’s Statement, October 2010.
[5] From an interview with the author in Hong Kong on December 11, 2010.
[6] Ibid.
