Michael Todd, YELLO ENSO, cone 6 stoneware, 16" x 16" x 6"
The Crocker Art Museum, in Sacramento has recently acquired YELLO ENSO. For more information on Todd’s art making practice, please read below.
“My earliest sculptural works were in wood, not carved wood, but joinery or carpentry. For several years they were in an assemblage form that I called fetishes. They were influenced by primitive African sculptures. Eventually my wood work evolved into a cooler abstraction, influenced by my five years in NYC in the sixties. They were shown at the Jewish Museum exhibit “Primary Structures” and in the “Sculpture of the Sixties” at the Los Angeles County Museum. Occasionally, I still revert to woodworking for a new series, most recently a series of wood circles and a series of architectonic rectangular gate forms. Wood has a carpenter’s humble soul, which draws me back periodically.
In 1968 I taught myself to weld for the sake of durability and greater structural flexibility, first in steel and more recently in bronze. In the early steel works I relied on the shapes of industrial steel: sheets, bars, tubes, I beams, C channels and much torn and twisted scrap steel. During the seventies I constructed some very large steel sculptures in a circular format, in which the negative space was very important. They were shown at the Hammerskold Plaza and at the Marlborough Gallery in New York.
Around 1980, by way of an invitation to cast bronze at the University of Southern Illinois, I was converted, not so much to casting, but more to the pouring or spilling of molten bronze into a bed of sand. With these new bronze shapes I was able to expand my formal vocabulary even further to include cast shapes and spilled free forms and organic shapes, which are affectionately called “HOT TODDIES”. They are like clouds, rivers, or doodles. I try to couple and contrast the geometric shapes and biomorphic forms into new relationships, to make the metal dance to a kind of visual jazz.
In my work there is a strong Asian influence from Japanese Zen and Chinese calligraphy, as well as a clear debt to Arshile Gorky and the abstract expressionists, Kline and DeKooning. I try to humanize geometry and minimalism to give it emotional weight. My circular pieces are like echoes of the cosmos. They represent the expanding universe and chaos, the Ying and the Yang. Making circles in wood, metal, and now clay is a continuing challenge.
Most surprising to my friends is my recent conversion to ceramics. For me it is like a new, late in life, lover. I find the pliability of clay very sensual. It is very primeval to start from mud, without the crutches of found objects or found materials. I have traded the circle for the cylinder, the VESSEL.
After throwing a vessel on the wheel, I tend to distort it by pressing the clay in and out and by pinching or piercing the wall. Often I will add shapes to bring it closer to sculpture, using both the inside and the outside. The vessel often contains parts of itself. Each vessel is named for a woman that I have known or admired.
Finally, clay has drawn me into making wall reliefs as a kind of 3 dimensional painting so that glazing has become a great color experience for me. Clay is wonderful. It has given me a new creative lust, late in life.” – Michael Todd