| Richard Edelman |
| I grew up around steel and around scrap iron. My father, an engineer, was in the scrap iron business. I worked around steel, iron, boats, ships, and foundries from when I was 14 years old. I studied engineering and philosophy at MIT. I wrote a lot of poetry and published during my youth but eventually ended up back in the steel business. I sell steel, I’m around steel, I’ve spent my life around industry, steel mills and when the time came for me to be creative, I naturally migrated to working with steel and sculptures. Sculpturally, I’d say my biggest influence was Degas. One of the things I really love about Degas is the simplicity of line and sense of balance. Perhaps it's because I’ve done engineering and engineering drawings. I really felt that I could take in Degas sense of balance. Whether it be an arabesque or a horse at trough, the underlying structure was immediately obvious. The sense of motion and balance is totally revealed to the viewer through a single gesture in space. Normally I don’t start my work from a drawing or sketch; generally what I do is try to bring out the potentialities of steel as a medium in a number of ways. I look for pieces of steel primarily in industrial sites I visit, through friends who work in industry, or in scrap yards. I bring those pieces into my studio and try to react to them. I think about them in the way you hear about certain Chinese artists. They react to roots they find and pull from the earth; looking into the meaning and potentialities of those pieces. I try to find the potentiality of that piece of steel and then manipulate it into a form that might be generally in the family of forms I’m working with at that time. It may be dancers, horses, reclining nudes, or any other potentiality that’s suggested to me by the steel. I tend to work on many different projects at the same time. I probably have 15 – 20 different sculptures in process at any time and they’re all being manipulated at once. I used to work for and was a student of Denise Levertov and she always told me, “When you make a discovery, continue to work with that discovery until you’ve exhausted it.” She wrote poems in series, I wrote poems in series and I think sculpture should be created in series. I think we work in a motif, we explore that motif and we come back to it. My sculptures need to move and I feel that the pieces tend not to be portraits and not even snapshots in time, but they’re gestures. What is it that I mean by a gesture? I think we mean not only a snapshot in time but also a projection in time. When my pieces are placed into new environments, different times of day, and new seasons, it gives a projection through time. I think that is really powerful and allows me to see what the viewer is seeing. And to that extent, I think it is collaboration. |