Spring 2007 Penland Line CT
-f
Patrick Dougherty, Sculptor
Sculptor Patrick Dougherty, who
collaborated with architect Dail
Dixon on the new Pines Portico (see
page 6), has been connected to
Penland throughout his career as an
artist. He made one of his very first
pieces here in 198^. He returned in
1994 to create a large, temporary
work on the corner of the Pines. And,
his connection with the school helped
him resolve a pivotal quandary in his
understanding of the nature of art.
During twenty years as a full
time, itinerant sculptor, he has made
more than i pieces—^many of them
monumental in scale—at galleries,
museums, schools, art centers, and
festivals all over the U.S. and in a
dozen foreign coimtries. These pieces
have all been made from woven twigs,
branches, and sticks, a method that
Patrick refers to simply as “stick-
work.” He builds the pieces himself,
often with the help of volunteers.
Some of his forms mimic the shapes of
buildings, the body, or vessels. Other
pieces are more abstract, but they gener
ally have openings and, given the nature
of the material, they almost always invoke
shelter, nests, burrows—^people want to
go inside them (a desire many of his
pieces readily accommodate).
The temporary nature of his work
puts him outside of the world of galleries,
collectors, auctions, and the escalating
value of artwork. “I remain a workman,”
he says. “I come Robin Welsh Studio
and I do a work
for you. You pay
me a salary. ...I
think it’s nice that
there’s work that
remains from pre
history and all
that, and you can
look at it and get
an idea of where
art has come
from. But maybe
there are other
people to address
that issue. I like it
that my work
comes and goes
and I have to do it.
The thing about the art world and the
world of ideas is there’s plenty of room.
There’s room for every variation. If the
work touches people, then there’s room
for it.”
Although his work is not immune to
A view of thejinished Pines Portico, Patrick’sJirst permanent installation. This structure was a collaboration between
Patrick and architect Dail Dixon who has designed several other buildings for Penland.
Patrick Dougherty
criticism or occasional controversy, the
response is usually quite positive. “My
intuition,” he says, “is that it’s something
from your back yard and from prehistory.
When kids go through the building phase
they understand sticks; it’s not something
you have to learn about....These pieces
talk about shelter, about natural phenom
enon. I realized that I could conscript that
imagery and it could resonate.”
Patrick has a Masters degree in public
health and had worked
for several years as a hos
pital administrator when
he decided to explore art
making through two
years of postgraduate,
nondegree work at the
UNC-Chapel Hill art
school. Near the end of
that time he started
experimenting in his
back yard with different
materials and made his
first piece of stickwork
sculpture. “It was about
eight feet long,” he says,
“and it looked like you
could get in it. It was
made out of really tiny
sticks.” He remembers a stunned silence
when he carried it into the Ackland Art
Museum for a student show, because up
until that point he had made almost no
work. “I was trying to face the idea of
what art was really about,” he says. “That
was so profound that I could never get to
the object. I was compelled to do this, but I
couldn’t figure out why I would do it.”
Shortly after that, he was in western
North Carolina doing some art projects in
the schools and was invited to spend a
week making a piece at Penland. “It was
the second piece I made. It was a very big
strip made of sticks I gathered here. It was
maybe 100 yards long and it made these
big loops as it went across the lawn. It real
Patrick built this installation, titled Roundabout, at the Tallaght
Community Art Center in Dublin, Ireland in 1997. It is 42 feet tall.
This is a good example of how making temporary work gives Patrick
access to sites that would otherwise be unavailable for public art. There
is lots more irformation about Patrick’s work on his website:
www.stickwork. net.
ly helped give me a sense of vahdity....
When you come to this place, there’s
a sense of a commitment toward a
different kind of life. People are
looking into the distance here and
thinking about merging materials and
ways of thinking to come up with art
objects. I really needed that infusion
at that exact moment, and I got it.”
It was also at Penland that he
began to resolve his dilemma about
making art. “One thing I could see
wh'en I came here was that people
could justify throwing themselves
into a craft, because they could say,
‘people can use this, somebody can
put it on their table, they can eat out
of it.’ But that didn’t quite satisfy me.
I really believe in craft in the sense
that I believe things should be well
crafted. And a lot of life’s best work,
your best thinking, is often done
with a repetitive act. But I slowly
began to realize that people have
other needs besides just eating.
“So I could see that making a sculp
ture that elicited powerful feelings from
people had a huge value because it
expands their capacities as human beings.
We have this incredible ability to feel
nuance, but in some ways it needs to get
identified. So, when you read a book, you
start identifying that other people have
had those slight nuances, slight differ
ences in feeling. I think good sculpture,
good dance, good writing, they are all so
promotive. They help
you as the maker, and
they help the viewers
into some transformative
experience, which you
can re-experience
because you’ve broken
the barrier; you’ve
crossed the threshold;
you can’t go back. So,
once I felt that way, I felt
really empowered.”
) When Patrick works
with students they often
express their own doubts
about the value of mak
ing art. “They will say,
‘well why would I want
to make anything any
way? Nobody cares.’ And
I say, ‘For this reason:
you’ve got a mission; art
expands people in seri-
ous ways.
—Robin i^reyer