by Damon Hildreth
THE BEGINNING
My first experience with sculpture was in kindergarten. Due to the weather,
many kindergarten classrooms in Michigan have a large table-height indoor
sandbox. I still remember carving endless shapes in the cool damp sand.
In high school, I found that I had a talent for drawing,
but it didn't excite me, it was just another thing that I could do well.
What I really liked was geometry. I could visualize the shapes floating over
the teacher's head whenever he described them. I just loved dealing with
shapes and their relationships.
My first year in college, a friend said to me, “lets
take Figure Sculpture, it's an easy ‘A’ and all you do is play
with clay and look at naked women.” To an 18-year-old male, this sounded
like the ultimate course.
The professor was great and taught us to not only to
look with our eyes but also to feel with our hands. The last day of the semester,
I had an amazing experience. The professor said "the model will hold the
same pose for the whole period and you can do whatever you want". As I began
to work, a strange feeling came over me. I was suddenly in another realm
where time had no meaning. My vision changed and the whole room went dark
except for the model and the clay. I was totally detached from, yet at one
with what I was doing. When the period was over, things returned to normal
and I thought "wow, what an experience, I think that I'll try sculpture
again".
The next class I took was different. I was given total
freedom, but my initial experience didn't repeat itself. I did a number of
abstract clay figures but though everyone liked them, I was dissatisfied
with everything that I made. Every piece that I completed seemed somehow
distorted, somehow flawed. No matter how I tried, I could not make a piece
of sculpture that satisfied me.
I gradually began to understand the situation. The forms that I was creating
came from a very deep part of me and my outer self, who I was on a conscious
lever, was quite out of sync with who I was inside, who I was meant to be.
I was like a distorting filter, a flawed tool. I knew then that I could not
make sculpture again until I found a way to correct my situation.
I knew that the solution would not come from the outside
i.e. psychology, because you cannot fix what is broken with what is broken,
so I began to search, trying many things, meditation, yoga, others. I achieved
some progress, but it was of a slow, gradual nature and I was not interested
in slow progress. Then I received a sign that it would be possible to find
a direct connection to the true teacher within me. I just didn't know where
or how.
THE OPENING
I had some friends in SUBUD. The odd thing was that they couldn't give me
any explanation about it. One day I decided to check it out. Men and women
went into separate rooms and I heard voices in a kind of free form abstract
singing that was so random that it could not have been rehearsed. This was
accompanied by sounds of movement. What I felt was a wave of energy so strong
that all I could do was to sit back and let it wash over me. I recognized
this energy from the first time that I had felt it, on that final day of
my first sculpture class. I knew that I had found what I had been looking
for.
After a period of checking it out, I was allowed to join
in the spiritual exercise known as the Latihan. Though the Latihan was only
a half-hour twice a week, its effects were not limited to those times. My
life immediately began to change. A very powerful transformation was occurring
within me and I felt like I was being turned inside out. I knew that I had
to find something to do to relax so I bought clay and carving tools and began
to spend a couple of hours each day carving and shaping clay. It was incredibly
satisfying and after a week I had a clay sculpture that was totally satisfying
to me.
I realized that I had not been made perfect, but that
a pure channel had been cleared from the deepest part of me to the outside.
I looked at this clay sculpture and knew that I had to cast it in a more permanent material. I located a sculpture foundry and had it cast in bronze. As I sanded the bronze smooth and polished it to a mirror finish, I knew that I had found my true calling, that which I had been born to do. I asked a successful sculptor friend where he sold his work and much to his surprise, within a month I was showing at the Gilman Gallery in Chicago.
TRAINING
Some months later, I was talking with the owner of my second gallery and
she said "I see that you really like Brancusi" with the implication that
Brancusi had been a big influence upon me. I had never heard of him. Art
was something that was happening to me, not something that I had trained
for or planned to do. Even though I was now showing in two of the best galleries
in the Midwest, I was essentially a naive artist, without any art training
or background.
Creating sculpture was something that was beyond my thinking
and control. During this period, if I sat down and tried to make a sculpture,
nothing would happen. Every month or so, a feeling would come over me and
I would know that it was time to make another sculpture. I was compelled
to create art. If I avoided it or put it off, my life would come to a grinding
halt. During the creation of each new sculpture, I experienced a dramatic
change in my inner and outer being, as if creating sculpture was really a
process of transformation and the resulting object was a record of this process.
I moved to Ann Arbor and worked part time as a carpenter while making sculpture.
I enrolled in college part time to study art with an eye to teaching. For
the next 3 years I studied everything in the art catalogue except sculpture.
For that I had an inner teacher.
During the next 3 years, while creating, I experienced
many different motivations. I found that I could only create successful sculpture
with no motive or goal in mind, just creating for the pleasure of creating.
This period of inner training in sculpture ended abruptly one day and I
understood that I would no longer be forced to create sculpture from within,
that it was from now on, my choice. I was glad that the turmoil and change
that had gone with my first few years as an artist was over.
Some time later I was relaxing at a friend’s house
and listening to Beethoven. I loved the music and realized that if one has
a gift to create, that it is a sin not to use it. A sin against oneself for
not using your talent and a sin not to bring forth any gift that you may
have. I decided to go back to sculpture again, but this time not because
I had to but because I wanted to.
A PARTNER
I met Dominique at a SUBUD Congress in Toronto. The moment I saw her, I knew
that I wanted to spend my life with her. She was an actress and a painter.
It was almost like an arranged match. Soon after we met, she looked at me
and recognized me from a dream of 6 months before. In the dream, she had
received a phone call from her spiritual guide who told her that it was no
longer right for her to be single and that she was being sent a husband.
Then she saw my face in her dream. We were married two weeks later.
It was time for me to get serious about making money.
We moved to Chicago and I enrolled full time at the Illinois Institute of
Technology's Institute Of Design while Dominique studied acting. There was
no time for sculpture now but I was growing artistically in other ways. I
discovered another love, photography. I realized that even if I never pursued
a design career, the training that I was getting in design school was the
best training that I could get for sculpture. It was highly disciplined and
results driven yet I felt total freedom within that structure. I was learning
to create within parameters, with constraints. A year and a half into it,
I was advised by my professor to transferred to the Industrial Design School
of Ohio State University.
After two years at Ohio State, school was becoming a
tough haul for me. Studying full time while working nights in a factory had
become like pulling teeth (my own). One night I was talking with the electrical
engineer of the factory. He said, "what do you really want to do?" I replied,
"I really want to be a sculptor, but you can't make a living at it". He replied
"you can't make a living playing baseball but Mickey Mantel did all right".
I knew then that my studying was over. It was time to follow my dream. So
three cities, and two children later, Dominique and I decided to pack up
and move to Los Angeles. It seemed like a natural choice, both a center of
acting and art.
AN ARTIST AGAIN
I was free to be an artist again.
This time it was different. Having worked in design had
freed me. I now had objectivity. I had learned to create within constraints
and face ruthless criticism of the results. Everything that I had done had
both satisfied functional standards and looked like my art as well. I had
discovered that own my innate sense of form was stronger than any influence.
Secure in my talent I went back to working in clay and casting in bronze.
Three sculptures later, I left clay and bronze behind.
STEEL
As my bronzes became thinner and more sheet like, I also felt the need to
create larger work. It seemed natural to work directly in metal. A common
design technique is to make mockups of finished products in cheap, easy to
manipulate materials, like cardboard and paper. I had made paper sculpture
before, and I reasoned that what could be done in sheets of paper could be
done in sheets of steel. I spent the next three years learning how. With
the initial sculptures, I worked with metal artisans as their assistant in
creating my finished work. As I learned the process, I gradually bought my
own equipment and did it myself.
Paper was liberating. I could cut, bend and fold it and
see a complete form in a matter of minutes. No longer did I have to make
molds and pour and finish a wax before I could see a shape in the round.
Drive by shootings and riots had become the norm in much
of Los Angeles. We decided to move to San Francisco.
THE BOB DYLAN SCHOOL OF POETRY
Dominique and I were in the process of packing for our move from Los Angeles
to San Francisco. An aneurysm broke in her head and she collapsed. Ten days
later, I had the very painful experience of watching her die before my eyes
of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Still in a state of shock, my 3 sons and I completed
the move to San Francisco. I rediscovered Bob Dylan and began listening to
his music on an almost constant basis. His poetic songs of pain and suffering
spoke to me.
A year later I was attending the twice weekly spiritual
exercise, the Latihan. This experience is different for everyone and different
every time. I fell to the floor in a dream state and experienced a vivid
reliving of Dominique's death. As images passed before my eyes, I heard a
description in verse, which became etched, in my memory. After this beautiful,
cleansing, experience, I wrote the verse down and looked at it thinking "this
could be the beginning of a poem". I had never written poetry before, but
I couldn't let it alone. I began adding to it, rearranging it, and saw that
the process was a lot like sculpture, but with words instead of shapes. What
resulted was my first poem DELIVERANCE.
As time passed, I wrote more poems of my experiences
and I had many other experiences that could only be expressed through poetry.
INFLUENCES
From time to time, people will ask me what are my influences. I never know how to answer. Everything that I see is an influence. From the leap of a cat to the dive of a hawk, from a great photograph to a Beethoven Symphony, from an ocean's shell to a twisted tire tread on the edge of the road.
SERENDIPITY
When I work, when I create, it is like going for a walk on the beach, looking
for an interesting shell that has washed ashore. If I find one, great, if
I don't I've had a great time walking the beach. However I know that I will,
after time, find that one special shell.
One day I was cutting down the edge of a piece of steel
for a sculpture that I was making. As I cut off the thin steel strip with
my jig saw, it curled and twisted from the heat of the blade and fell to
the floor. I bent down and picked up the curled strip of steel. It was curled
into a beautiful shape. I looked at it and thought, "I'll make strip sculpture
next". A couple of weeks later, I went into my maquette studio and with the
curled strip of steel before me, cut strips of aluminum and began to play
with them. As the forms began to take shape before me, I remembered the story
of the Gordian Knot and had the feeling that I was recreating fragments of
it. Thus began THE SECRETS OF THE GORDIAN KNOT series.
CREATING
When creating new form, I work in maquette scale, sometimes starting in paper,
sometimes in paper-thin aluminum. I use scissors to cut the material and
my fingers to bend it. This ease of manipulation allows me to create an endless
number of sculptures in miniature. Of 100 maquettes that I do, 99 may end
up in the trash. In these hours of discovery, hours of play, I watch as shapes
transform themselves before my eyes, looking for that special moment when
a new being comes to life.
Creativity for me is like a Zen concept. A wise man once
said of God: "It is wrong to look for God because God is everywhere. It is
also wrong to not look for God because we should be always striving to come
close to God." I experience a similar thing in creating art. If I strive,
make an effort to find new form, then I find nothing. If I make no effort
to create, nothing happens.
- Damon Hildreth 1998
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
I am an explorer charting the unknown territory of the inner self. Within
this territory resides a mirror of every force and creature in this world.
As a hunter/gatherer of these life forces, I never know what I will find.
These forces, experienced as feelings, become visual entities in a language
of form which is a mirror of my nature.
When I first arrive at a new form, a form I sense as
true, I recognize it by a feeling of surprise, a feeling deep within that
touches my soul. This sense of recognition is like that experienced by soul
mates when they meet, like meeting a friend who you knew long ago in a far
away land, the memory of which is like smoke in a mirror. As the mirror clears,
I record these forms in steel.
My HIEROS GAMMOS (Greek for holy union) series is about
relationships - of forms, of feelings, of people, and of people to art. Each
sculpture is created from the same from paired, and differing only in curves,
bends and in the relationship to it's twined form. The sculptures can be
seen as one entity, two entities relating, or two entities captured in the
process of becoming one.
There is no one way to understand or interpret my work.
When seven people were asked to comment on one of my sculptures, I received
seven different answers, each revealing of the individual as the sculpture.
Whenever people ask what my favorite sculpture is, I always reply: "the next
one, the one I have not yet done."
- Damon Hildreth 1996
DELIVERANCE
I see
the shadow form
(true servant of God)
of the angel of death
standing by the head
of my lover’s bed.
Foglike it creeps
(I curse my gift of seeing)
over her delicate form
taking her soul
in a sudden whirlwind
leaving me only the empty shell.
Making my faith a liar
(I was sure she would not go)
I hear myself say
“your mom is dead”
to our young sons,
newly half-orphaned,
crying in my arms.
As grief becomes sin,
deliverance is given.
her visit unexpected,
beyond human words.
touching eternity,
I know redemption;
knowing of her life,
in the world next door.
Shaking with fever
(the gift has been given)
I fall to the floor,
quiet and still.
listen quite clearly,
the poet arises,
waters of death
flow from me no more.
- Damon Hildreth
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