Thursday, October 23, 2014
Monday, August 25, 2014
Fisher of Men
With permission from DHTV and special thanks to Bryce Benlon and Mark Honer, Wickerson Studios LLC is extremely excited to release this small sample of the documentary/film project underway called "Fisher of Men". Both Beth and I are eager to view the final cut and assist in the promotion of this film work in the coming months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHh0AE2AWvw&feature=share
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHh0AE2AWvw&feature=share
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Fisher of Men
Jorge Luis Borges wrote a
fascinating short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ about a world, discovered
in an Encyclopedia, which slowly through the literary process, comes to posses
customs, philosophies, psychology, history, language and literature. So much so
that it inevitably grows to encompass and eventually overwhelm our own world.
Tlön and Uqbar are a world which:
A secret and benevolent
society… arose to invent a country. Its vague initial program included
"hermetic studies," philanthropy and the cabala. From this first
period dates the curious book by Andrea. After a few years of secret conclaves
and premature syntheses it was understood that one generation was not
sufficient to give articulate form to a country. They resolved that each of the
masters should elect a disciple who would continue his work. This hereditary arrangement
prevailed; after an interval of two centuries the persecuted fraternity sprang
up again in America. In 1824, in Memphis (Tennessee), one of its affiliates
conferred with the ascetic millionaire Ezra Buckley. The latter, somewhat
disdainfully, let him speak - and laughed at the plan's modest scope. He told
the agent that in America it was absurd to invent a country and proposed the
invention of a planet. To this gigantic idea he added another, a product of his
nihilism (4): that of keeping the enormous enterprise a secret. At that time
the twenty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica were circulating in the
United States; Buckley suggested that a methodical encyclopedia of the
imaginary planet be written. He was to leave them his mountains of gold, his
navigable rivers, his pasture lands roamed by cattle and buffalo, his Negroes,
his brothels and his dollars, on one condition: "The work will make no
pact with the impostor Jesus Christ." Buckley did not believe in God, but
he wanted to demonstrate to this nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of
conceiving a world.
-- Jorge Luis Borges,
Labyrinths, 1988
Though I doubt Mike has
ever read any Borges, his sculptures and drawings attempt in their own way to
modestly duplicate Ezra Buckley’s efforts, in that they are the awkward
remnants of a machine-age which never happened.
His sculptures are built
out of concrete, steel and bits of wood. There’s an industrial feel to them;
both in the sense that his work seems to be the creation of some foreign manufacturing,
but also because they’re the tools that would work in some unknown and
unknowable endeavor.
I’m tempted to say that
they seem to be the modernist leavings of a more primitive world. Of a
civilization left behind. An awkward society of giants able to lift monstrous
tools of stone and wieldy machines of iron. Yet, at the same time, those very
materials are those of the world of now. Concrete, forged steel and milled
wood. They’re the detritus of our industrially developed North America and its
crumbling manufacturing sector.
And so, like Tlön, Uqbar,
Orbis Tertius, Mike’s sculptures are the firmament of a world not rediscovered,
but one created in toto and waiting, either for entropy to bury it again, or
for the lands of his fertile invention to overcome and overwhelm our own.
- Lars Townsend, Michael
Wickerson Catalogue Essay, 2012
Monday, June 30, 2014
Tuesday, June 3, 2014
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Wickerson Studios' most exciting commission to date!
http://blog.azahner.com/restoring-a-classic-the-canopy-for-commerce-bank/?utm_content=bufferd176d&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin.com&utm_campaign=buffer
By collaborating with Wickerson Studios, Zahner was able to exactly replicate the 197 aluminum festoons, tassels, rosettes and trim castings. These were produced using aluminum casting in 3000 pounds of resin sand molds at the Kansas City Art Institute by Michael Wickerson, sculpture chair at KCAI. Two KCAI alumni and one student (Keyan Alemifar, Piers Watson, and Joey Williams) were also involved in the project, and would see the decorative elements from casting, to finishing, to delivery at Zahner’s plant.
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Tuesday, April 29, 2014
The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness
What are the marks of a supernaturally changed heart? This is one of the questions the Apostle Paul addresses as he writes to the church in Corinth. He s not after some superficial outward tinkering, but instead a deep rooted, life altering change that takes place on the inside. In an age where pleasing people, puffing up your ego and building your résumé are seen as the methods to make it , the Apostle Paul calls us to find true rest in blessed self forgetfulness. In this short and punchy book, author Timothy Keller, shows that humility means we can stop connecting every experience, every conversation with ourselves and can thus be free from self condemnation. A truly gospel humble person is not a self hating person or a self loving person, but a self forgetful person.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Wickerson Studios - year four, 2014
Absolute Freedom at Wickerson Studios! There is no other way to describe it. Imagine 11 acres of rolling hills and timberland in the middle of America. A place full of red earth with plenty of hardwood. What more could test the strength, endurance and imagination of any creative spirit? What do we really know about pioneering our own alternative buildings, forging a life for ourselves and constructing and operating our own kilns and furnaces? In fact, unless one has ever challenged themselves beyond the realm of theories and ideas and attempted a hands-on approach of demonstration and experimentation, absolute freedom may very well remain impossible to achieve.
Although most of the processes may appear filthy, exhausting and undesirable, it is my belief that the highest form of clarity in life cannot be achieved without the uncertainly and risk involved in chain-sawing raw timber into new-fangled dwellings, forging metal, firing clay bodies and casting molten bronze and iron. Courage and survival still stand hand in hand. Sustaining oneself depends on relying on ones own resources. Personal instincts, skills and feats of stamina continue to uncover and reveal the wonderful experiences that await us in our lives.
As strange as many of the illustrations and photographs contain on this website may seem; my intention is to dig deep into our common desire to build our own foundations on this earth, disregard any traditional dogma, and allow for a more sensitive and better world to emerge.
Thursday, April 24, 2014
Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Sunday, April 13, 2014
New Luddism
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
What gives you the most joy in working the land?
What
gives you the most joy in working the land?
I am most content and tranquil while
shoveling. Digging the earth provides me
with more material, both physical and psychical, that I could ever acquire by any
other means. I firmly believe that everything
we purchase is basically free of charge and that we are only paying for
processing and transportation of that material.
Looking to the land and what is beneath my feet allows me to “stand my
ground”, fundamentally and conceptually, and, in turn, manipulate, transform,
and reflect upon all that it provides.
There is a time to dig and mix the earth
after a rain. Transporting and processing occurs when the earth is dry for
about a week. The grass is utilized to
bind and ram the adobe mixtures. The sod
is employed at the right time of year and the earth clay is pressed and kiln
dried in the anagama kiln.
There is a season for everything, and the
climate dictates what must be done. Most
importantly, it won’t get done on its own. “I build what I need because I need to...”
Tell
me about the structures in the images.
Understanding the method of construction
for each of the building is directly tied to gaining knowledge about the
content of each of the structures themselves.
In an attempt to “build ruins” I have experimented and researched and
developed several different processes while aspiring to create these
structures.
Hamlet’s Mill
Hamlet’s Mill was constructed from 16
large foundation rammed molds and built from 400 large sun baked adobe bricks. I have experimented with several different
canopy designs from a rain guard to a corbeled roof, from herringbone bricks to
a parachute awning, and onto a final wooded aviaries design.
Hamlet's Mill digs deep into the earth
and boils rainwater into the air. It is a place for the mind and soul and
constantly resists the term, dwelling. Gardens grow both inside and out and
animals nest in its branches and twigs. No work will be done in this place. It
is a place for well-deserved rest, relaxation and healing. – (Taken from
Wickerson Studio blog February 2013)
I completely lost myself in this
landscape sculpture. Hamlet's Mill harkens back to Jung's Tower, a lighthouse
in Baltimore, a revolutionary water house in Toulouse, a Midwest kiva, an
Iranian ice factory, and a traditional coke kiln. Rammed from earth, clay,
straw and water; this structure rises from the mud and sets aloft stabilized
bricks that intend to arch underneath a herringbone roof. Form follows
function, as the space defines itself and sets my body and heart to work.
Keeping pace with the rains and the sunshine dictates what chores must be
completed today. I am only as good as I am when I am laboring over this form.
The Grieve Foundry
The Grieve Foundry was built initially
using sod in honor of my grandmother, Ruth Polley, who was raised in a sod
farmhouse in Winnipeg Manitoba. Although
she prided her family for owning the only piano around, my open vented building
houses two large foundry furnaces that runs off of charcoal.
The Grieve Foundry is the laboratory.
Raised and rammed from the dead trees and surrounding mud. This building houses
the equipment required to cast liquid iron and bronze and the machines capable
of manipulating and transforming cold steel. Traditional lost wax castings find
their forms within this earthwork and the artist's endurance and strength are
tested within its walls. – (Taken from Wickerson Studio blog February 2013)
Moby Dick
Moby Dick, the anagama kiln, used to kiln
dry CINVA earth rammed bricks has been constructed from high temperature
refractory clays that I use in my furnace and cupola designs. It was constructed over an inverted ship mold
using wooden lathe and plywood ribs.
Oddly enough this kiln is the most livable space, providing protection
from the wind and rain and houses to its own internal hearth.
Moby Dick, the twenty-foot interior cave
kiln is designed to fire the earth into bricks that will then be used to
pavestone, wall, and build additional structures in and around the expanding
studio. Small earthenware artworks will find their way in and around the,
much needed, bricks and inspire the utilitarian structure to achieving new
creative heights. – (Taken from Wickerson Studio blog February 2013)
Little Otik
Little Otik, a.k.a. littl’ Oscar’s Tower,
was an experiment in employing non-mortared and non-stabilized CINVA earth
rammed clay. Although this structure
towers the highest on the land, it will be short lived once the spring rains
begin. This structure, more than any
other, was built solely for the digital analogue prints, FIRE OVER KANSAS. It is the beginning of my acceptance and
embrace of the theatrical and temporal.
Oscar’s tower was designed from the
beginning to be in service to the digital happening that occurred in the fall
of 2013 and is made “immortal” in the photographs that were employed in the
artwork series, FIRE OVER KANSAS. I have
yet to fully comprehend my role as artist, architect, project manager, and
sculptor during this collaborative project.
One thing I can say for sure is that the aesthetically
similar yet different and new experimental processes assisted in maintaining a
common theme, time, and place for the FIRE OVER KANSAS edition of prints.
Cupola, Cupola (the burning ship)
The last structure is the burning earth-ship. I can best describe this piece as the last
artwork I intend to complete in the city and away from the studios located out
at the Wickerson Ranch:
Cupola, Cupola is a complex mixed media sculpture
intended to display an alchemic vehicle that fuses together the concepts of
both a ship and a bell tower. Inspired by the Klokkenstoelen of Northern
Holland, this cupola capped tower and iron casting cupola come together in
order to facilitate their own entropic existence. Imagine this smoking
leviathan, meandering along, as the bells chime and the wagon lurches, all the
while, casting 2500-degree liquid iron into functional wheels and bells.
Cast from boilers placed below the Kansas City Art
Institutes administration building in 1904, this artwork memorializes, records
and honors the matriarchs of the Wickerson, Polley, Grieve and Evans families
in 200-pound iron and nickel cast bells set up to 18 feet in the air. Bellows
assist in igniting the charges of iron and coke fuel while the machine
struggles to work endlessly into the night.
The ship gathers the flotsam and jetsam of miscast
and dead sculptures in its hull and recycles the heavy metals back into
functional equipment. Although "all that is solid melts into air" and
"this equipment belongs to the earth", this Sisyphean wagon trudges
along, breaks down and rebuilds itself, as it bellows and rings out with all of
its might. - Wickerson 2010
Is
there a philosophy of success in your artistic career and your personal life,
including your young sons?
The more I think about it, the more I
believe that a center of fine arts must take on vocational workers ideals: ten
days, ten months, ten years. This seems to be the only way to meet
inarticulate needs. - Wickerson Studios, Spring 2013
Purpose:
I wish to further
develop the private studio and sculptural landscape of Wickerson Studios by
facilitating it with additional equipment, supplies and materials in order to
serve a growing community of artists.
My efforts and
ambitions seem to be moving beyond my personal development and exhibition of
sculptures and ideas. I feel the need to expand my efforts in the
arts. My American arts community has grown from 12 students in 2001, when
I moved here from Canada, into an international exchange of ideas spanning the
globe. Beginning to develop my private studios on an institutional level
will allow me to continue to serve the alumni and artists that I have come to
know. I look forward to creating new artworks, all the while, serving
other artists with the same enthusiasm and drive that has inspired me to make a
life for myself in America that develops personally and professionally with
creative individuals.
What
is passion for you? What is passion for Beth?
Although I do not feel able to define
passion in a general sense, I do believe that the following Mantra sums up the
passion I have for the studio and the time I have on earth.
Wickerson Studios Mantra:
1. Work outdoors
2. Value the seasons
3. Utilize natural
light
4. Watch the sunrise
5. Follow the moon
6. Let the weather
control the temperature
7. It all returns to
the earth
8. Everything exists
in a long-term landfill
9. Endure, breath,
move
10. The heart is the
only motor
11. All we are is our
mind and our health
12. Shovel, dig, make bricks
I will leave this section for Beth
Wickerson to define her own concept of what passion means to her.
However, in my opinion, she is the physical
embodiment of the heart and passion of Wickerson Studios. She is the creator of our two sons, Oscar and
Max. The latter of which struggled and
was born on the floor in front of our family fireplace (hearth and mantle) at
Wickerson Studios in 2011.
What resonates in capturing and sharing Fire Over Kansas?
Perhaps FIRE OVER KANSAS can best be described in the
following format taken from the website, however it is much more that this and
I believe that your first writing started to uncover its origins regarding my
family and my relationship with my colleague, Jaroslaw Rodycz:
Title: FIRE OVER KANSAS
Date: October 2013
Description: digital happening/archival
pigment print
Fire Over Kansas, 20.5 x 30.5 Archival
Pigment Print (Series 2/15)
Agni, 23 x 24 Archival Pigment Print
(Series 2/15)
Matylda, 23 x 34.5 Archival Pigment
Print (Series 2/15)
the Watch Tower, 23 x 34.5 Archival
Pigment Print (Series 2/15)
Collaborator: Jaroslaw Rodycz,
concept/photography & editing
Collaborator: Michael Wickerson, production
manager/buildings, artworks and forms
Collaborator: Erik Meulenbelt,
consultant/logistics & personnel
All images © Rodycz Wickerson
Although I am still processing the
meaning of the series of digital prints, I believe that I have come to understand
that it is collection of analogue images that center around the same concept,
place, and time: the Wickerson Ranch.
Similar to Greek Theater, the collaborators, attempted in a very short
period of time to immortalize a happening that was framed by several years of
building and planning.
I hold very dear to me the statement
that Ashley Anders, a long time participant at Wickerson Studios, has demanded
an answer to and what the series of works resonates and captures. Although I remain completely overwhelmed with
the outcome, Ashley manages to simply and clearly uncovered the critical moment
that all involved in the project are currently facing:
In collaboration with Jaroslaw Rodycz and Erik Meulenbelt
from Holland, Michael has reached a point with Wickerson Studios in which a
great deal of appreciation, contemplation and critique is in order. [Their}
accomplishments call for internalization by individuals not only in our
community but also around the world.
Additional Information
Quotes from Others:
As Homo Faber Mr. Wickerson’s show was
well planned, but has a relation to an apocryphal and scatological tale of an
old Inuit man, which I should like to recount now. Rather than be acculturated/institutionalized
in government housing; they have taken away all his tools: knives, spears,
fishhooks, sled, etc. He steps outside the govt. shed drops his trousers, defecates into
his hands, and molds it, lets it freeze into a knife shape, uses to kill the
first dog, which he skins. He fashions a sled out of the bones; traces and
harness out of the skin; harnesses the other dogs and mushes out into the
blizzard. Michael determined to create a show with nothing but his
hands and plaster, he’s a person who does what he intends.
- Yours Russell Ferguson 2006
Michael Wickerson is
a man of many words. His crazed appearance and anxious working manner is
validated by intelligent expressions and deliberate actions. The direction and
ultimate realization of his work is comfortable being in a constant flux. The allowance of free thought and dreaming on
this 11 acre land has lead us here today to view these three prints. In
collaboration with Jaroslaw Rodycz and ERIK MEULENBELT from Holland, Michael
has reached a point with Wickerson Studios in which a great deal of
appreciation, contemplation and critique is in order. His accomplishments call
for internalization by individuals not only in our community but also around
the world. - Ashley Anders 2013
"Whether in
Cambrian or in other earth
Conceived; or yet in
Protozoic slime
And ooze in the
abysmal depths of time,
Dawn has concealed
thine elemental birth;
Or whether yet,
on-creeping man in dearth
Of tool offensive,
welcomed thee sublime,
Perverting all thy
virtues but to crime
While unmatured lay
thy finer worth.
It matters
naught-save only this-that now-
Man's better nature
to thy baser yields;
His heart is steeled
with temper of thine own;
His soul is hardened
with thy touch, and thou
Dost send him blindly
forth to reap these fields-
'Blood, sweat and
tears'-thine iron hand has sown."-G.H. Case, "To Iron Ore", in
M.F. Harrington, ed., Poems of Newfoundland, p. 5
"Nor do I doubt
that whoever considers this art well will fail to recognize a certain
brutishness in it, for the founder is always like a chimney sweep, covered with
charcoal and distasteful sooty smoke, his clothing dusty and half burned by the
fire, his hands and face all plastered with soft muddy earth. To this is added
the fact that for this work a violent and continuous straining of all a man's
strength is required which brings great harm to his body and holds many
definite dangers in his life. In addition, this art holds the mind of the
artificer in suspense and fear regarding its outcome and keeps his spirit
disturbed and continually anxious. For this reason they are called fanatics and
are despised as fools. but, with all of this, it is a profitable and skillful
art and in a large part delightful." Biringguccio, "Pirotechnia
On a final and
invitational note:
Please feel free to contact us, should you be
interested in proposing a site specific work and/or would just like to shoot
around some creative ideas with a herd of deer or a rafter of turkeys.
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