Patrick Dougherty gives tree-hugging new form in sapling sculpture

Author: Maddie Oatman


Radio Arts Middlebury catches up with Dougherty during his three-week residency at Middlebury.

Patrick Dougherty, a lanky, silver-haired artist with a soft Southern drawl, began his career by creating stick sculptures around his own yard in North Carolina. Now, internationally recognized and know for his work at various universities and public locations around the world, he continues to sculpt with simple materials found outdoors.

His awe-inspiring structures, which evoke a sense of organic movement and often offer emotional depth, belong in a child's backyard fantasy or a creature's nesting place. Dougherty, working at Middlebury College until Sept. 28th with local volunteers, is using silver maple saplings found on Weybridge Street to create an installation in front of the Kevin P. Mahaney '84 Center for the Arts (CFA) that will remain for the next couple of years. So far, the sculpture has taken the form of several swaying huts with curling peaks and odd openings that even allow the viewer to climb inside. The Middlebury Museum of Art (MCMA) will display an exhibition of photographic and video documentation of some of Dougherty's past works until Dec. 9th.

In a lecture given in the CFA Concert Hall on Sept. 19th, Dougherty confessed to his audience his realization that he did not need to create a masterpiece in order to dedicate his life to art. But, take a walk to the CFA, peer up at his ever-evolving, magnificent sculpture and decide for yourself whether Dougherty may have developed a new kind of public masterpiece using the natural world as guide. The Middlebury Campus caught up with Dougherty in the midst of his work. See interview below.

The Middlebury Campus: What experience did you have working with wood before you became an artist?

Patrick Dougherty: Early on in my life I just had the experience that people who enjoy the woods have - as a child playing with sticks and building forts and as an adult walking in the woods. I live in a log cabin so it was easy to imagine using the other end of a stick for a sculpture when I got going on my work. I just like being out in the woods and I like building things that remind other people of what that experience is like. I capitalize on the current, intense desire that people have to connect with their natural surroundings. As we feel more tentative about the Earth - with climate change and so forth - the work seems to be more potent.

TC: You were saying that you do not have a strong connection to politics - that that is not your aim - but do you ever feel involved or connected to the environmental movement?

PD: I would say that would be more of a personal quest of mine, not necessarily an artistic quest. I think that sometimes you can be too heavy-handed in the direct approach. The fact that people might remember their feelings about the natural world by being in one of your pieces is a much more subtle way of having them come to the point of thinking, "I hope that we can be careful with the environment, I hope that we can think about it in a different way."

TC: Do you have a favorite kind of tree to work with?

PD: These silver maples here at Middlebury are really good. Often I use willow, elm, dogwood, sassafras and strawberry guava. I have used lots of kinds of things.

TC: It's great that you are using material from around the area.

PD: Yes, I think that it makes a big difference that you are fully embedding it [the sculpture] into the community and it comes from the community. You ask people to help you from the community and it really works out well.

TC: Besides the material itself, did you take from forms around Middlebury or buildings in order to incorporate them into the piece?

PD: Well, you have the peaks on this building here (pointing to CFA). I was told that there was another building that was torn down that had lots of peaks as well. Plus, you've got this peak over here in the skyline (pointing to the tip of Mead Chapel), so you know it resonates a little bit. And, of course, the tree shapes. But I was also thinking of the potential to resist snow and bad weather and I think that is often a really big issue. You can only build certain images when the weather allows. You are not going to be able to make something that's very ephemeral and very tentative in a place where you have a lot of snow and expect it to stay up, so you have to be a combination of really practical and at the same time you have to not let practicality close down your ideas.

TC: To what extent do you design as you go?

PD: I do a lot of that. What I do is I set parameters for the work - how should these things be, how should they sit the front of the building, how do they impinge on the plaza that was here? We have a walkway that runs through it, so how can we use it to our advantage so that people could, during really inclement weather, walk right up to it and walk right in it? I think that all of that planning goes on. But beyond that, on a moment-by-moment basis, you can see I don't have that much control (pointing to volunteers standing on scaffolding bending saplings and twisting them around each other). I mean, I am watching what everyone's doing, and now that we have a precedent for what to do, it is easy for people to help. I go back and I do the exterior, and I am putting those doorways in, and then I let people work on the inside while I work on the outside.

TC: Your pieces evoke an organic form and they are made from organic material, but sometimes you do jugs or even Dixie cups. What are you trying to say about the contrast or the connection between the organic and the civilized?

PD: You try to get as much leverage with your images as you possibly can. Sometimes it is the tolerance of the site. Say you are at a place where there is a reference to water, you could say, "Well, I'll make some water jugs," because that is basically what the public could understand right off and that would be an entryway into them appreciating [the sculpture] on a different level too.

Because it is in a way a dwelling, it is a little bit like a basket, it is a little like prehistory and it has lots of references. A little like a walk in the woods, a childhood fort, a squirrel's nest or a bird's nest that you see in your garden and you really appreciate. I think they are good sculptures when they cause a lot of personal associations with the viewer so that they have a starting point. If it is a very abstract piece and they can't find any way to connect with it, it may be a great piece of work and fit in well with the world of ideas, but just be totally lost on the viewer. People have to be willing to give it a minute. A sculptor's approach has a lot to do with whether they're willing to take that minute.