Part two of the stickwork project by artist Patrick Dougherty was going down this week- so exciting to see progress! The first two pictures show that the sticks were finally making their way from being un-leafed to being lodged in the ground. From there the artist and the volunteers took sticks and wove/ bent/ pushed, pulled, and yanked them into the other sticks to create the beginnings of one part of the first sculpture.
The scale is absolutely massive and this first sculpture easily towers 20 feet into the air. The first day, Patrick described it as "amorphous", (which describes his previous works pretty well too) but it's only after seeing the before and after that one gets the sense that all these are not just sticks are growing out of the ground but a figure which just decided to land there overnight. And though it's awesome in person, it makes these pictures a bit hard to understand because you really can't "feel" the size of this thing. The four shots at the bottom are different perspectives of the same door sized hole in the first sculpture. Yes, it's big enough to have doors and windows; does that help with scale?
The first time I walked in, my eyes automatically were drawn up (to the literally hundreds of pounds of sticks that made up the 15 feet of walls above my head) and all I could think was "There are no nails holding this thing together!" Even after I swallowed that first bit of engineering astonishment, I continued to be amazed that something so sturdy and large and naturally beautiful could stand without relying on anything man-made but instead relied solely on each individual stick to hold itself together.
Happy Friday.