Manipulating metal and wood may be a material process, but to sculptor John Richardson, it achieves other aspects as well.
“For me, art is a spiritual process, partly done in a profane place such as a university or gallery,” he said during a lecture Tuesday at Pittsburg State University.
Currently the associate chairman and associate sculpture professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, Richardson has a one-man exhibit titled “Balance,” in the University Gallery, Porter Hall. It will be on display through Nov. 23.
He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Wash., and a master of fine arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During his talk, he traced the evolution of his work.
“Early on in sculpting, I was interested in direct processes, so everything was doable and knowable,” Richardson said. “About five years ago, I started molding and process work that I had previously avoided. Quite a few years back, I decided to use an elliptical form as a halfway point between the natural and geometric expression, the tension between something natural, which grows in nature, and something synthetic or manufactured.”
After he completed graduate school, Richardson moved to Milwaukee. “I made a lot of fabricated steel sculptures,” he said. “I also had a side business making welded metal fixtures, custom work for places like restaurants, so I could survive in the world. I made things people wanted to afford in a space to make things I wanted to make.”
Around 1989, he said, he began to feel as if he were working in a factory and punching a time clock.
“So I left welded metal and went back to wood,” Richardson said. “I did primarily wooden sculptures for a time. The welded sculpture was a call, and the wooden sculpture, which was painted white for a reason, was the response to that call.”
A few years ago, he began using some color in his work.
“About four years ago, I became interested in trying to find a different way of making a sculpture that was closer to the ways we know our body,” Richardson said. “I wanted there to be a flexibility, a soft part and a hard part in the sculpture, the way our bodies are flesh and bone.”
He began incorporating rubber and silicone in his work, and some pieces have silk linings.
Richardson said that, when he begins working on a sculpture, it is first inert material. “As I work on it, it has its own being that comes into existence,” he said. “In every work of art I make, something unexpected has happened.”
Sometimes that something results in a work that the artist doesn’t want to let out of the studio. At other times, the sculpture comes alive in its own way.
“At its best, the practice of art, a sculpture, teaches me something about the world,” Richardson said.
He said the finished product is not the most important thing to him, though it’s good when others like or appreciate a sculpture.
“The most important part to me is the daily process — working in the studio when it’s cold in the winter or hot in the summer, working when I don’t feel like working and when I want to,” Richardson said. “I feel that sculpture, the practice of art, has helped me become a better human being.”
He has participated in more than 50 national group exhibitions and many one-person shows. His work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Michigan Legacy Art Park, Xiadu Park in Yanquing, China, the Open Air Museum of Steel Sculpture in Coalbrookedale, England, and the Lumsden School, Scotland.
Richardson’s exhibit is open free to the entire community from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. Anyone needing additional information may contact S. Portico Bowman, gallery director, at 235-4305.
