Glass: 2001

Featured artist James Watkins

A Pattern Language: The Sculpture of James Watkins

"...can we really create nature or does it require that we do something other?"
Isamu Naguchi

A leaf, a boat hull, a mask, a spoon, a jug - these are some of the nominal references in the art of James Watkins. At first glance he employs a seemingly laconic vocabulary with a few key forms and textures drawn from a fusion of nature and culture. Look longer at one or more of his sculptures however and they metamorphosize before our eyes from a general shape to a complex set of relationships between convex volumes and concave voids, surface and mass, translucence and opacity. If at first a specific object is defined, soon others are suggested, then a range of different interpretations occurs, all the while hinting at the universal forms of multiple things in the world at large.

Sculpture has always had this set of transformative possibilities as it is closely connected to the traditions of artisan object making. The morphology of ancient vessels, aboriginal arrowheads, clay pipes, or silverware (to name only a few object types) comes out of the need to refine, reshape, and clarify forms through a range of function and taste. Normally, this is a process which unfolds over long periods of time, adopting form to shifts in materials, uses or aesthetic value.

For 20th century sculptors like Constantin Brancusi or Isamu Noguchi, the sense of this natural and dynamic process of change became intentional, condensed into the work of a single maker and often recaptured by turning to familiar forms from their indigenous cultures. Quotidienne objects from their respective ethnic backgrounds - benches, funerary markers, architectural details and domestic objects - are often the starting point for their rough wood, textured stone or metal sculptures. Nature was a second trove of inspirations in the form of birds, geological formations and anthropomorphic forms.

Likewise, Watkins makes much out of a coherent and consistent core of references and materials. Work from the early eighties like Constructions SB and FH, 1983, while using more metallo-mechanical forms, shares much with a newer piece like Crystal Ming and Fiddlehead, 1994 with its more bulbous swelling curves as if they are different points on the same evolutionary chain. This slowly evolving 'consistency' is at the heart of Watkins art, with most of his pieces created a few at a time from a relatively small range of materials, with a similar handling of surfaces and shapes. Yet because of, or perhaps despite such self-imposed boundaries, he finds myriad variety in the reductivist arena within which he chooses to work.

One way he does this is by retaining the freshness of the hand worked black-brown surface of his studio waxes in his finished products. One might expect the bronze form in Overlay, 1997 to provide an equivalent tone and weight to the wax, but Watkins achieves the same vitality in his pate de verre works like Ewer with Leaf from the same year. The shards and cut off scraps of wax around his studio underscore the importance of the initial, hepatic, hand-wrought effort in every work be they finished in bronze or glass.

In one set of works, the small, hand-sized pieces from the Vocabulary series, 1994 Watkins declares his intentions most clearly. Here the series of tactile forms can be grasped both literally in the hand and figuratively in their meaning. Each gives breadth and depth to the others in a non-fixed sequence of elements that is as much like the periodic table in its potential for mutation and combination as in an alphabet that can be shaped into an unending possibility of words and ideas.

Ultimately, his work is about contemplation as much as it is about the action of making. His work slows down our perceptual process so that we can consider the possibilities of interpretation rather than having the obvious and often literal shapes name themselves.

The universality of his forms reflects whole worlds of fauna, floral and artifactual antecedents. We soon find ourselves asking questions, Does the translucency of a glass form complicate its exterior shape or help us perceive its major volumes? Does a shaped outline in a relief derive from a three dimensional work or vice versa? Are the other elements which give context to his pieces like wall plaques, boxes, or horizontal bases integral to his objects or apart from them?

Unlike most objects in our modern world, the things that Watkins makes afford his viewers the chance to think, to consider the possibilities, to contemplate, and thus to imagine. He has done this by focusing on what the architect Christopher Alexander called a pattern language - a timeless set of forms. Alexander explains the power of his primary forms as:

Architectural - so deep, so deeply rooted in the nature of things, that it seems likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years, as they are today.
(Alexander, "A Pattern Language", pp.XIII, 1997).

So it is with the kinds of related forms found in Watkins Mr. The Bottle, 1985 or Vocabulary #3, 1994 or Still Life with Carambola, 1997, which like the elemental parts of a spoken language depend in part on each other for their potency and meaning.

Watkins art is as enduring and infinite as evolutionary biology, as a walk through a Japanese garden, and as a hint at all the wondrous things that make up our material culture. His sculpture is the epitome of a very human, thought-provoking, venerable and vital language

 

Ronald J. Onorato