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    The Sculpture of Robyn Horn
    The Sculpture of Robyn Horn
    The Sculpture of Robyn Horn
    Ebook318 pages1 hour

    The Sculpture of Robyn Horn

    By Robyn Horn

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    In Robyn Horn’s thirty years as a wood sculptor, her work has evolved from small, lathe-turned objects to ten-foot-high redwood compositions like her Already Set in Motion #1170, which graces a garden at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In creating these forms that rise from the earth at improbable angles, Horn’s primary tool is the chainsaw, and yet a tenderness for her medium reveals itself in the delicate balance of planes that allows her sculptures to both loom and flow, visually indicating that they are precarious when in fact they are sturdy.

    The essays and images in The Sculpture of Robyn Horn sketch the industrious career of this Little Rock, Arkansas-based sculptor, illuminating her attention to geometry, physics, and the philosophy of design, and exploring the context and origin of the various series—Geodes, Millstones, Standing Stones, and Slipping Stones, among others—that characterize her body of work.

     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Arkansas Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2018
    ISBN9781610756419
    The Sculpture of Robyn Horn

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      Book preview

      The Sculpture of Robyn Horn - Robyn Horn

      THE SCULPTURE OF ROBYN HORN

      THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS PRESS

      FAYETTEVILLE

      2018

      Copyright © 2018 by The University of Arkansas Press

      All rights reserved

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      ISBN: 978–1–68226–066–1

      e-ISBN: 978–1–61075–641–9

      22 21 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1

      Designer: April Leidig

      ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1984.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Horn, Robyn, 1951– Works. Selections.

      Title: The sculpture of Robyn Horn.

      Description: Fayetteville : University of Arkansas Press, 2018. | Includes index. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017056067 (print) | LCCN 2017057056 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610756419 (electronic) | ISBN 9781682260661 (cloth : alk. paper)

      Subjects: LCSH: Horn, Robyn, 1951– Criticism and interpretation. | Wood sculpture, American.

      Classification: LCC NB237.H577 (ebook) | LCC NB237.H577 S38 2018 (print) | DDC 730.92—dc23

      LC record available at https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__lccn.loc.gov_2017056067&d=DwIFAg&c=7ypwAowFJ8v-mw8AB-SdSueVQgSDL4HiiSaLK01W8HA&r=4fo1OqKuv_3krqlYYqNQWNKNaWxXN20G1PCOL-2ERgE&m=FIi_LQHYx9mMlg_mbI7Us3tdmmprl5zHUfeC0BATH7s&s=l9xk6AuAyJexivXPiADmRmIbXVj0olm3D4NHr1R5zVI&e=

      Frontis: Already Set in Motion

      To Karen and Dede Hutcheson

      who both love art as much as I do,

      and to my husband John who

      always says, sure, we can lift that.

      — Robyn Horn

      Gravity and defiance of gravity; unity and disunity; dead blocks of matter and organic living forms; the will of nature and the will of the artist—all these, and many other tensions, are suggested with a single irregularly shaped block of wood.

      Surely, it’s a testament to our time that a lady hefting a chainsaw now feels like a very natural thing, and in fact somehow does not seem out of harmony with a strangely sensitive side to these works—their attention to the organic and to the properties of natural life and growth. But, whether it’s the cutting that goes against the grain or with the grain, in both cases we feel we’re attuned not to something weak and demure, but to a powerful force—a force to be reckoned with.

      — HENRY ADAMS

      CONTENTS

      PERSPECTIVES

      Searching for Movement | Joyce Lovelace

      Defiance of Gravity | Henry Adams

      Minimalist Formalist | Cindi Strauss

      A Singular Path: Constructive Illusion | Janet Koplos

      The Sense of an Artist: Making Marks | Robyn Horn

      SCULPTURE

      Shifting Gears | Rachel Golden

      Contributors

      Photo Credits

      Permanent Collections

      Index

      PERSPECTIVES

      SEARCHING FOR MOVEMENT

      JOYCE LOVELACE

      Robyn Horn has always loved those lines from James Taylor’s Walking Man, the title track of an album he recorded in 1974. She was just out of college then, a young woman who liked to sing, play guitar, and paint, with vague dreams of working in a creative field. The lyrics moved her, for reasons she probably couldn’t have articulated at the time, but that would resound decades later in her art.

      He had a series of songs for a while that had a lot of restlessness and movement in them, like he could never really settle down—or at least it sounded that way to me, Horn says of Taylor, still one of her favorites.

      Today, that theme of motion and volatility—the urge to meander, break free, even fall apart—resonates powerfully in the rocklike geometric sculptures Horn carves out of wood. Ranging from pedestal-sized forms to ten-foot monuments, her works bear titles such as Slip Sliding Away, Slightly Off Course Again, and Approaching Collapse; several, like Walking Man and Hypothetical Destination, are named in homage to Taylor songs. They suspend tipping points, when something’s about to give: a crumbling arch, a stack of dominos, a gust of wind, a wave gathering momentum before crashing ashore. They lurch, lunge, whirl, teeter, tilt, and shift—and, as she says, you’re not sure exactly where they’re going.

      Moving in silent desperation

      Keeping an eye on the Holy Land

      A hypothetical destination

      Say, who is this walking man?

      — JAMES TAYLOR

      Movement, it turns out, has been a leitmotif of Horn’s artistic journey. Ask how she became an artist, and in her easy, candid manner, she’ll credit good luck and timing, a case of just cruising through life when her life’s work found her. Launched by a chance encounter with a rotating tool—the lathe—her career rode a new wave of turned-wood art, evolved into sculpture, rose to ambitious heights of scale and expression, and continues to flow in a myriad of formal and conceptual directions: arcs, lines, angles, circles. If her path has been serendipitous, she has followed it with determination, challenging herself physically and imaginatively to capture in elegant, dynamic form those moments on the brink, when everything changes.

      My intent is to explore the visual concepts of motion and instability, while still retaining structural integrity, Horn says. With their overlapping layers, improbable proportions, and suggestion of moving and missing parts, her sculptures look sudden and precarious precisely because they’re so sturdy and well-crafted. Each begins as a single hunk of wood that she cuts with a chainsaw or band saw, then refines with power and hand tools. It fools the eye, which I enjoy, she says of the illusory aspect of her work. People have to look hard to determine if it’s all one piece. They want to believe it’s assembled. I like messing with them a little bit—that’s kind of fun. The fact is, her designs couldn’t physically hold together any other way. Maybe it’s a metaphor for life: to show weakness, be open to disruption and change—let it all fall down, to quote another Taylor title—requires strength and stability.

      Likewise, a firm foundation can free a creative soul to grow and take chances. If Horn is a wanderer and seeker at heart, she’s as grounded and down-to-earth as they come—drawn to movement, but also fascinated by the immobile majesty of stones. Over the years, her explorations have been sustained by her cultivation of technical skill, her passion for modern and contemporary painting and sculpture, her enduring friendships in the wood art community, her long and happy marriage, and the life she and her husband, John, have built together on their rural property just west of Little Rock, Arkansas.

      Her Arkansan roots run deep, the fulfillment of the pioneer spirit of her forebears. Horn’s great-grandparents migrated down from Indiana around 1900, incentivized by the railroad’s effort

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