Nature Revealed: ‘Liminal Biomorphism’

Turning abstract concepts into tangible realities is central to the work of sculptor, Cornelia Kavanagh, who looks to the natural world for her inspiration. For Kavanagh, sculpture is an assimilation of both physical reality and the introspective, as she mediates on the power, beauty and dangers found in nature. The common thread in her work is a desire to access deeply-embedded emotions to be discovered in the sheer beauty of manipulated forms. Most recently, she has turned her attention to forms reflecting her commitment to environmental activism. Kavanagh’s goal: To have her sculpture connect with the world of our experience in a manner that is both pleasing and instructive. xxxxxx

Richard Friswell: For those who are unfamiliar with your work, your early inspiration by the sculpture of Henry Moore is no coincidence. Tell us a bit about your intellectual and visceral connection to that body of work and the significance of the term ‘The Shape of Time’ in your life and earlier sculpture.

Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh: As a self-taught sculptor, I am honored whenever people perceive the influence of Henry Moore in my work. I feel a deep spiritual connection with him. When Moore died in the summer of 1986, it was the very time I was beginning to carve stone. I tore out his front page obituary from the New York Times and pinned it to the wall of my studio. Subliminally, the greatest of modern sculptors took hold over me, symbolizing the spirit of majesty in his mastery of form. Moore saw around the corner of representational reality toward a more personal, archetypal energy where a radiant vitality speaks through his forms. It is this “essence” that most interests me, whether in his underground tunnel drawings from WWII or his entire body of biomorphic abstract sculpture.

My connection with Henry Moore also feels personal by association. In The Shape of Time, my father’s well-known book on the history of man-made things (Yale University Press, 1961), one of Kubler’s central themes posits that the history of art is one of cross-cultural relationships where works of art from the past repeatedly find expression through the work of living artists. This notion had such profound influence on me that I honored my father’s writings with a “Shape of Time” exhibition at the 2005 Venice Biennale where I represented the US Virgin Islands Council on the Arts. At this event I displayed several sculptures that were inspired by artifacts from ancient cultures. One example is a piece called CHACMOOL, my interpretation of the Toltec-Maya deity that was so influential to the development of Moore’s reclining figures.

RF: You began working as a sculptor later in life, unlike many other successful artists. But, I’m sure you struggled to find your voice, nevertheless. What were those early years like and when did your work begin to be noticed?

CKK: In the seventies when my children were young, I tried to have it all: family, a career teaching high school history coupled with a husband whose business required extensive travel. Yes, it was a struggle, especially since what I really wanted to do was to become an artist. But, it was also a most memorable part of my life. I enrolled in local pottery classes where, one day, tiring of the mechanistic aspects of wheel work, I carved deep into a fifty pound mass of wet clay with a fettling knife. Although I loved the void my gesture created, the wet clay slumped right back into its former amorphous shape. Then, allowing all fifty pounds to dry overnight, I discovered I could carve without losing the form I had in mind. With refinement, that semi-dry lump of clay became my first sculpture.

Several years later, having gained experience casting early clay pieces in bronze, I began experimenting with stone carving, learning by trial and error how to use the pneumatic chisels, die grinders, drills and diamond blades that are needed. Thrilled by my growing proficiency, stone became my exclusive medium for almost 10 years until demand for my work necessitated a return to softer materials so I could more quickly produce maquettes for metal casting.

As my inventory of stone sculptures grew, I began submitting work to juried shows, ultimately winning awards including the Amidor Prize for Stone Sculpture at the 51st Art of the Northeast Exhibit in 2000 at the Silvermine Guild of Artists in New Canaan, CT. Later, I was proud to read Vivien Raynor’s New York Times review, in which she compared my sculpture favorably with the work of Barbara Hepworth!

By this time I was completely engulfed in the process of carving stone. Living within the realms of my imaginings, I was interested in creating a body of work that could express the inherent beauty of natural forms in ways that were not primarily decorative, but rather reflective of my inner feelings about the “essence” they contained.

RF: In what ways has your interest in figurative sculpture evolved into other forms or motifs? Related to that process, how do gestural and emotional components in your work play off, or support one another?

CKK: Initially, my figurative work was modeled after Moore but I slowly developed a more gestural style that was better aligned with my personal vision. THE MUSE PROJECT, prepared for an exhibition in Miami’s Design District during the 2007 ArtBasel Miami Beach, best reflects this evolution.

Instead of the nine goddesses born to Zeus and Mnemosyne on Mount Olympus, my MUSE sculptures are abstract figures named after women I have always admired for their ability to find the balance required of an artistic soul — the equilibrium between intellect and emotion; public persona and private self.

The show celebrated four sculptors (Louise Bourgeois, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Barbara Hepworth and Louise Nevelson), a painter (Georgia O’Keeffe), a potter (Maria Martinez), a musician (Mitsuko Uchida) and a Buddhist nun (Pema Chodrun). THE MUSE PROJECT also included a large sculpture I called ODALISQUE, patterned after Ingres’s eponymous painting in the Louvre, painted a vibrant pomegranate red to symbolize confidence and fulfillment of life’s dreams and visions.

RF: Your sculpture has found its way into a number of hospitals and other healing environments. What do you think the subtle message is that might help to account for that appeal?

CKK: Two years ago, when asked to speak to the Association of Graduate Nurses at the Yale School of Nursing, I prepared remarks on the subject of how art heals. Scientific studies indicate a certain type of art heals, but that not all art heals. Art that heals can change our physiology from an attitude of stress to one of deep relaxation. Art that heals can affect every cell in the body. It can change our perceptions of our world, helping us access our imagination, emotions and feelings, even our perceptions of our pain. Art that heals heals from within.

The word for this field of study is psychoneuroimmunology. I believe my sculpture finds its way into hospitals and other healing environments precisely because it has a calming, spiritual presence. On a deeply personal level, having my sculpture prominently displayed in the lobbies of both the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, and Yale-New Haven itself feels profoundly satisfying. I spent many months as a small child in isolation at Yale-New Haven before the source of my illness was discovered and treated. Earlier this year another of my sculptures was placed in the lobby of the new University Hospital of Princeton at Plainsboro, New Jersey.

RF: Your studio in CT is on Long Island Sound, and you spend part of each year working out of a studio in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. How does the immediacy of the natural world affect your thinking about yourself and what you hope to communicate through your sculpture?

CKK: If my studios were not on the water, I would have to place posters of waves and jagged coastlines upon their walls. The sea is as much a part of me as I am of it although, to be honest, I really cannot swim. Furthermore, while I am afraid of the sea’s power, I am drawn to it and love it for its numinous quality as Great Mother and great destroyer all in one.

Ever since the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia, I have been particularly interested in the paradox water presents as sustainer of life and as agent of destruction. Over the last seven years I have expressed this dichotomy in different ways through sculptures of tsunami waves, Arctic ice moulins, and most recently, through pteropods, microorganisms that I have abstracted and enlarged some 400 times.

RF: As abstract symbols of either immediate or long-range global crises, what do you want the viewer to take away from your work?

CKK: Underscoring every body of work I have completed over the past several years has been the inherent will to educate. Walking into my 2012 exhibition at Blue Mountain Gallery, visitors might have thought THE PTEROPOD PROJECT: charismatic microfauna, was merely an unusual display of biomorphic shapes coupled with wall charts and photographs of tiny mollusks. Upon closer examination, however, I believe some were soon dissuaded. The exhibit was, in fact, a very considered, thought-provoking collaboration of art and science, whose primary intent was to engage viewers in a dialogue with how life functions beyond the lens of what the human eye can see.

THE PTEROPOD PROJECT was developed with Dr. Gareth Lawson, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who felt that a fine art exhibition focused on tiny marine animals, with shapes evocative of Arp, Miro and Kandinsky, would be a compelling form of outreach – one that offered a completely novel approach to alerting people to the growing danger of ocean acidification arising from unchecked levels of C02 emissions. As it turned out, both the art and the message were extremely well received.

RF: I have always sensed in you a personal gratification when people respond emotionally to your sculpture. Can you tell me more about that visceral link you hope to sustain between you, your work and the viewer?

CKK: A visceral response from viewers at my exhibitions simply means that my work has resonated with them emotionally. If their reaction is positive and deeply felt I am very pleased. In some cases, collectors have written to me about their feelings for my sculpture as they have experienced living with it over time. This is particularly gratifying, as sculpture is capable of continually rewarding in refreshing new ways.

RF: When you begin a work in the studio, are you carrying a mental image of where you want to end up, or is it more visceral and instinctive? How do you know when you’re done?

CKK: This is the most perplexing question of all. I simply do not know the answer. I do know that my mind is filled all day with images. They arrive in sleep as in awakening, messengers from ancient archetypes, or those subliminal depths out of which dreams arise, perhaps even from the locus of the psyche itself. I have read enough art history and art theory to know that this is a veritable goldmine for some astute psychiatrist intent on probing into the sources of all creation. I am content just knowing that, at my advanced age, I still wake up filled with ideas for work, and that my mind and my hands still work in collaboration with my head and my heart.

As to the second part of your question, I never feel I really finish anything. There comes a point, however, when work ceases even though I still see things in “finished” carvings I could adjust. It is frustrating to carry around this burden of unfinished business, but I try to maintain a sense of good humor, and to just move on. Done is done.

RF: I’ve noticed that many of your outdoor bronze pieces are finished in richly-colored patina. How does that particular finish help complete the work in your mind? When you direct the foundry to produce a high mirror finish, you must be looking to convey a different emotional message. What are the deciding factors, if any?

CKK: Bronze casting is a very expensive, highly technical process. After a finished maquette leaves my studio, the multiple steps involved in its production are really out of my control, other than refining its wax before the piece goes into ceramic shell. I do, however, have control over many aspects of the final look of the sculpture by deciding the color of the patina I want, then supervising its application.

Over the years, most of my bronze sculptures have been finished with a golden brown patina that darkens over time to a rich reddish hue. This patina, while historically associated with Moore, also reflects, at least for me, the luminosity of great stillness. To convey a sense of “lightness,” I sometimes have my bronzes micropolished. For a highly reflective sculpture called AEVUM II that I carved to celebrate Thomas Aquinas’ notion of the Aevum as the “duration of human souls, having a beginning but no end,” patina would have seemed too somber and down-to-earth.

RF: Your work so often seems to bear the hallmarks of figurative or biomorphic influences. Is it fair to think of you as a humanist, even at your most ‘abstracted’ moments of inspiration?

CKK: I am not sure how to answer this question, Rick. If by “humanist” you mean one who has learned from the study of different cultures, then I guess the term applies. Although I waited until middle age to become a practicing artist, art has been an integral part of my life since early childhood. Having attended 16 schools on three continents, and having had an engaged art historian for a father, an extensive exposure to art and culture continues to inform my work. While biomorphism has, and likely always will, shape a large part of my artistic output, humanist inputs are deeply imbedded in my persona. They cannot be ignored.

RF: Your sculpture begs to be touched. Why do you think that is?

CKK: This is a true compliment. It begs to be touched because, in a perfect world, it would be touched. Think of that bronze pig in the market square in Florence. Passersby rub his nose for good luck, I have often rubbed his nose, and his nose is golden, a natural patina created by constant touching. The nose also never needs oiling or maintenance. I wish there were more places in the world where people could polish my work! Touching sculpture is an immensely satisfying experience.

RF: Where do you think your muse will be taking you next?

CKK: I do not know. I am grateful every day for a renewed sense of wonder, and I am sure this will lead to many more satisfying artistic explorations in the future.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Cornelia Kubler Kavanagh received a BA in Art History from Barnard College and an MA from Columbia University. In 2010, Pine Manor College awarded her a Doctor of Arts, Honoris Causa, for “integrating art, education and science in beautiful art forms that please the eye and nourish the soul.” She is listed in Who’s Who in American Women and Who’s Who in American Art, Kavanagh is a member of the National Sculpture Society and the National Association of Women Artists.

Kavanagh has had five solo exhibitions in New York City. Her sculpture was exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennale, three OPEN exhibitions in Venice-Lido, Miami’s Design District during Art Basel Miami Beach (2007), New York’s American Museum of Natural History during the Ninth International Polar Weekend, The Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, MA, SOFA Chicago, IL, and numerous museums and galleries throughout the country.

Above, left: ‘Wave Form V’. 2014. painted cast resin. 19.5” x 36” x 12.5”. “My latest ‘Wave Form’ sculptures are based on the roiling circularity of waves and the contradictions inherent in the beauty found in the energy of storm-tossed seas.  In carving this work, my intent is not to depict what agitated water actually looks like.  Rather, it is to convey my emotional response to an element that soothes, nourishes and occasionally terrifies.

She currently has an exhibition called, FRAGILE BEAUTY: The Art and Science of Sea Butterflies, at the Smithsonian’s Sant Ocean Hall, in the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC. Other installations include the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Dwight School in Englewood, NJ, Lancaster Winery in Healdsburg, CA and the University Medical Center of Princeton, in Plainsboro, NJ.

To see the full range of her work visit: www.corneliakavanagh.com.