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ARCTIC ICE MELT: moulins of my mind
Telling a story is a traditional role for the artist. We have statues of famous people and history and religious paintings. Nowadays, narrative art tends toward the symbolic. So it is with Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh, whose abstract sculptures explore ideas about history and respond to public events. Kavanagh’s sculptural forms have remained much the same over the years as her subject matter has changed.
ARCTIC ICE MELT: moulins of my mind, Kavanagh’s latest body of work, addresses water’s paradoxical characteristics-- bringer of life and agent of destruction. The tsunami that struck Thailand was a giant ocean wave. Seasonal rivers flow over the tops of glaciers at the earth’s poles during melt time, discharging at the margins or into vortex-like drainage features called moulins. As the planet warms, moulins are becoming larger and more common. Huge amounts of melt water flow through them, slowly destroying the glaciers.
ARCTIC ICE MELT: moulins of my mind is Kavanagh’s response – intellectual, emotional and artistic – to polar ice melt. Her sculptural language – ovals, crescents and sweeping curves – comes out of her life experience but also suggests the vortex-like moulin. “My forms,” she states, “come naturally from the curve of my arm as I work. They’ve been with me all my life.” She relates them to playing the piano as a child, “working through the rhythmic time signatures of classical music by making big circles in the air with my arms.”
During the 1990s, Kavanagh began to carve stone. Some of her early sculptures were a personal dialog in form with words and concepts in The Shape of Time: Remarks on The History of Things (1962), a book by her father George Kubler, the art historian. This now classic text replaces the notion of style as the basis for histories of art with the concept of historical sequence and continuous change across time. The Shape of Time has been called a “sober, deeply introspective and quietly thrilling meditation on the flow of time and space and the place of objects within a larger continuum.” |
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The Shape of Time really grounded Kavanagh as an artist – and it has carried her through to her recent work with moulins. “What I learned from The Shape of Time,” she states, “was to turn my attention away from putting form to duration to putting shape to mega-events –to finding new ways to work.” The turning point came in December, 2004, when the tsunami hit Thailand. This mega-event, a reality that’s “bigger than you and me” and “global in nature” fired her up, Kavanagh says. She immediately began to search for a way to “carve out giant crushing waves from blocks of material.”
Stone was too laborious so Kavanagh replaced it with floatation foam, a product that’s used to build floating docks. Much lighter and easier to carve, dock foam comes in nine-foot logs which the artist cuts and glues into appropriate sizes for carving. Next, she sketches forms on the surface and “digs right in” with saws, “refining the shape” with rasps and sandpaper. If she gets stuck at some point, she photographs the piece and visualizes alternatives by drawing on the prints.
If the sculpture will be shown indoors, she covers the carved foam with plaster, textures the surface and paints it. If the piece is destined for outdoor exhibition, she covers it with Aqua Resin®, a hard plastic-like material that is extremely durable.
During 2006, Kavanagh read about the melting of arctic ice and became deeply engaged with the problem. Soon she discovered moulins – the word is French for “windmill” – and theorized that moulins resemble her archetypal sculptural forms.
Seeking guidance from Dr. Stephanie Pfirman, a glaciologist who teaches environmental science at Barnard College in New York City, Kavanagh was directed to Dr. Konrad Steffen, a leading moulinologist and climatologist at the University of Colorado. Steffen had lowered a rotation laser digital camera into a moulin to measure the volume of melt water running through it.
Steffen’s moulin video confirmed for Kavanagh that her sculptural moulins were “valid symbolic representations” of natural phenomena few people will ever see. This led to Kavanagh’s exhibition during the International Polar Weekend, February 7 & 8, 2009, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
From the day she made her first carving, Kavanagh’s work has flowed consistently. “Time to water is a continuum,” she states, “and water is a diminishing resource. I’m proud of what I am doing and can’t see doing anything else for the rest of my life. The right way to make art is the way that goes through your heart, your spirit.”
Victor M. Cassidy
Art Crictic for SCULTURE, Art in America
and ArtNet
December 20, 2008
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