During May 2006 internationally renowned American artist Patrick Dougherty constructed the Big Willow sculpture on the Brahan Estate near Dingwall with the help of members of the Scottish Basketmakers Circle.  Now complete, the sculpture will be ‘in-residence’ until May 2007 and can be visited throughout the year.

During construction Patrick was interviewed by willow artist Anna King and craftscotland editor Tina Rose.

Biography

During the last decade Patrick Dougherty has built over 100 works throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.  This is his first sculpture in Scotland.  He started his work when he combined his carpentry skills with his love for nature and learned about primitive techniques of building while experimenting with tree saplings as construction material.  In 1982 his first work was included in the North Carolina Biennial Artists' Exhibition and in the following year he had his first one person show in North Carolina. His work quickly evolved from single pieces on conventional pedestals to monumental scale environments which required saplings by the truckloads.

(Tina Rose) What made you want to work on such a large scale?

(Patrick Dougherty) Just as a personal preference.  I have felt a little bit confined by drawing with a pencil. This dovetails with the idea that you can draw on a really large-scale; plus, I’d start out using clay and doing - trying to do, pottery, various things, and I kept trying to make things that were bigger and discovered that this was a different kind of “green-ware”, that you could work larger: the sticks are very flexible, you can morph the shapes easily, and they don’t have to have very much preparation. That was one aspect.  And then it turns out that these materials are available very readily throughout the United States primarily because of developments and urbanization.

I was woefully unaware of a lot of the activity that was going on in England, Scotland and Ireland that had to do with traditional crafts and the use of sticks and various kinds of natural materials like that.  There was a long tradition here in terms of Chris Drury, Richard Long and David Nash – all these people that had used all these kinds of materials. Some of my work was simultaneous with that, but I was really unaware of it until a few years into the work and I realised that there were other people in the world – like Japan – every place – that were really interested in natural materials.

And so I managed to start a career,  get a lot of interest in the work.  Traditional curators and so forth were very uninterested in the work initially because they just didn’t think there was much to using natural materials, but as it’s turned out the public interest in the environment is another kind of driving force and it’s actually the public that’s demanding this kind of work – work that’s tentative, work that’s temporary, work that has some resonance with the public beyond. 

This work has a good conceptual base and it’s got lots of reasons that you could call it “art” but also people tend to respond to it personally.  So I’m just also following this groundswell of people who are – and many of the basket-makers understand this – capitalising on the fact that the public is interested in natural materials and craft energies. 

There’s a lack of agrarian life now, you don’t get to visit the grandparents as often and how many of them have cows on the farm now, so there’s a huge interest in both the hand work and also traditional ways of working as well as just the feeling of nostalgia.  There’s an attempt to reach back, so there’s a huge response from people’s gut level when they notice the materials.   They feel like you had some interior knowledge of it almost genetically.  This was mankind’s first building material and so there’s a huge personal response to it and this has led me to feel like this is my definition of a good sculpture – one that has lots of personal associations in the viewer. It’s not a sculpture that you have to learn a lot about: either technique or learn a lot about how it fits into the lifeline of art to understand it.  In other words, I feel like a good sculpture is one where the normal person or the educated person has a resonance with it and is able to bring a lot of their own personal experience to interpreting it.

(TR) Your sculptures are different depending on the location and the surrounding history.  What impact has this particular location had on the sculpture?

I don’t do research as such; now some people really need to know a lot about the site. I just need to know how to find some personal starting point for working on a piece of sculpture and then the rest of it is a clear reaction, a personal reaction to the site. The scale is hugely important in terms of successful public work or work that’s in public space.  In this particular case, I didn’t have a choice of looking around; it was like that the island was a good place. They said, “Can you work here?” I said “I really can.”

Ultimately what happens is that I’m (the sculpture) at the end of a long alley of trees, the manor house sits at the other end – the old stables, and they live there and so I’m catching the energy of this and it’s kind of a balance.  I don’t have to make a piece as big as the house, I just have to make one big enough that looks like the scale is right for the house as you look at it from the other end. The general public is not going to stand up at the other end of the alley and look down, so I just have to make sure that this piece is of a scale that seems to balance out the house on the other end from this end.

Immediately upon arriving I found pictures in the vacation literature about the standing stones here and I was looking for some method of working that would allow me to have a lot of silhouette: if I made a big solid piece down here it might look like a tree. I wanted something that had a “tooth” like the standing stones, I imagined them like “milk teeth” for the earth or something and so I thought they would have a nice dramatic outline from a distance because the site does allow an intimate walk-up, but generally if you are walking around in the fields or fishing here you are going to see it at a distance and so I wanted it to read from a distance.

I just generally like the whole idea of a distant past being reflected.  This is an ancient way of working too.  There’s this kind of first architecture type initiative so no matter what shape you choose a lot of the associations are going to be with home and interior and shelter and primary place. Then in deep history, the idea that the tree was a source, that it was the source of our own life, that we might have even evolved from trees, in a conceptual way, so it’s nice that these shapes suggest first source, or the source of our dependence on trees, our dependence on environment.

We’ve got it organised so that it’s not a full circle, that it’s a partial circle, with a piece that’s set back.  The last piece is set back into the circle slightly and it’s going to be smaller, like, I wouldn’t say “mother”, but it’s more sheltered…and it reflects across the way to this other piece…another corner, some kind of a standing stone on the other side, which has been newly placed there so this will vaguely…you might notice, or you might not notice that there is a match, or a mirror of the other side. But anyway, the idea of pre-history or pre-historic architecture is meeting another more recent kind of architecture or paying attention to it.

Then we’ve had the basket-makers come.

(TR) Yes, I wanted to ask how you’ve found working with them: whether you’ve exchanged different ideas, whether you’ve learnt or got new ideas from them, and if they’ve influenced what you’ve been doing?

Yes, that’s always true. Part of it is just a scale difference, their scale is different from mine, so I think there’s been a bit of an adjustment in that for them to make, but what is great for me is that these are people that love handling materials and also see an immediate and direct relationship.  You walk into the woods and you pick up some straw and you can use it. There’s an immediate hunting-and-gathering response that we share – I could use that; I could use that fibre; I could note this – and so everybody that’s come to work for me, they’re not bored, they’re used to working with their hands, they immediately can get to work and after they see the parameters I’m setting, they just have started working.

I’m not too prescriptive about how they work because I want to have a product that I recognise but on the other hand there’s a lot of latitude when you work and how you work and generally pretty soon, with materials of that scale, and that’s what they are aware of, you can direct them slightly but if you start out solving all their problems for them and tell them, you have to do it this way, you have to do it that way, you don’t laugh or discover, it’s no fun.  They’re volunteering, they ought to have a bit of fun with it and have a little time to do some experimentation during the time they are working together.  I’m not as aware of their work as they are of mine because of the situation.

(TR)  Have you seen any of their baskets?
 
Sometimes people have brought me pictures and showed me what they’re doing.

(TR) And do you ever make baskets?

No, I’ve never made any baskets.  I’m more appreciative of the act now than I was, say, when I first came. What you do is you start with the seriousness of the people involved, in what you feel like their relationship to the natural world is, and to materials, and upon that level you establish a kind of respect and so it’s easy to respect the activity of the people so it works out that way that I might see basket-making in a really different light. 

Also just the whole effort towards ways of working intermediate technology that is lost easily like, Caroline (Caroline Dear who was artist-in-residence for the first two weeks of construction) was splitting a stick,  and she’s got to split it exactly down the middle, and she knows how to use her thumbs and her forefinger and just work it and it’s split. Well, to me, that took a long time to develop but you could show somebody easily how to do it, they could turn around and do it easily, but if they needed to discover it, it would be a whole different kind of process, it would be a long-term thing of trial and error, so I saw in just a short time how many little tricks go with working in these natural materials and making something that’s successful or over something that looks untrue, which is just kind of juvenile.

I pick up things all the time that I might use, that I see somebody doing; I immediately start being more productive, when I see something that’s working. People here tend to be really strict, imagine willow as their basic source, but I use every kind of stick and I explore lots of different things about different kinds of sticks.

(TR) I wondered if there were new materials that you’d used here that you hadn’t used before?

Well, I have used willow fairly regularly in places, but I’ve used things like starbreak awhile, crab apple; there’s just a million things, whatever’s available and so I don’t have the choice of shipping or buying, I’m using a garnering from somewhere.

(Anna King) How do you like the Scottish home-grown willow?

Well, this is great.  We’ve learned to use it. Initially we started with “Oh, that’s not as good as this” but then we realised that basically we’ve got three different kinds and this one’s very flexible in the shaft of it, or these could be used for this, so we’ve developed an overall style. Just watching everybody work with the materials we’ve seen what certain things will do and what not so we’re sequencing the materials.

(AK) Finding what they won’t do as well as what they will do, is important, isn’t it?

Yes.  We can see that if we sequence our materials and put some underneath and some on the top and festoon with some others that we can make a pretty good go of it and make a more interesting shape. It’s my job as a sculptor to try to excite people’s imagination: I’m constructing illusions, then I exploit the materials and try to give meaning to my concept and form by using the materials in innovative ways and trying to pull shapes that are more interesting than other shapes.

(AK) I found it interesting, what you said earlier about not doing much preparatory drawing. You are drawing with the willow aren’t you?

Right, I do thumbnails sketches that tend to elucidate the scale of it if nothing else. We made a little mock-up here, we made a model – there’s part of it over there, with my stones, in the corner and we haven’t been absolutely true to life with that but we’ve judged the scale of each new piece by stone: the relationship of the initial set-up that we had.

(AK) I took some pictures the last time I was up of the models and these things were still standing up. It’s a very good thing to relate to.

Well, some people need more starting points than others, some people do more elaborate drawings because they feel a lot more comfortable in that world.

(AK) Some people will tell you if you can draw it you can do it.  It’s the way I used to teach my students. It makes them think, even just small, about relationships and shapes and balance and things like that.

I’m very reactive, just as somebody might be in solving the problems in a drawing. It’s easy for me to take chances without feeling that I’m at the edge of my wits. I just simply try to understand how I feel at any given moment and just let that sway me back and forth as I gather without really being theatrically self-conscious about it and emoting …and it’s a nice place to be in and you can have other people around you working and people can walk up to the site and you are walking for a minute through this very pleasant place of creativity so it just evens out.

(TR)  I notice that most of your work is deconstructed at some stage.

Yes, generally, all of the work is temporary. It probably capitalises on realisations as you move along. Initially I was allowed to use lots of interesting spaces that were not identified as sculptural spaces, because I give the work back, I mean, I give the space back and take the work down and so you are able to use somebody’s front yard or a tree that couldn’t stand a long-term work on it, because it might kill the tree. 

I like these kind of interventions where I could go and be in places where you weren’t supposed to be, in fact you could almost be like a renegade. It could lean against your building in an odd way and it seemed like this sculpture was interceding in spaces that they weren’t meant for almost. You have the act of surprising people with the placement of the sculptures and so a lot of that was meant that it had to be temporary and you had to give it back. Ultimately you saw the advantage of that because you didn’t have to get permits, you could say it was temporary so you got a parade permit, generally from the city, or you found – in somebody’s front yard – and did it in that in the middle of town and then it became a public sculpture just because so many people could see it, but that meant taking it down.

Then to the point that generally everybody does temporary work, if you’re doing newspaper article, you’re not really interested in that more than the day you wrote it and after that you pass it on to somebody else to read. So my need is a kind of process orientation where I love making things and when I’m finished making it I’m bored with it, and then it’s somebody else’s job to pick up the other half of the burden and try to see if it’s any good and make comments about it and say, “I really don’t think it’s working”, or “I think it’s working”, and so you pass your effort on to the viewer and the viewer makes some judgement calls and then there’s a conversation started to develop about the work and so I’m satisfied on one level I’ve got moving through works and on to the next work and on to the next work.

The issue of art history and whether there’s something that you can get credit for, a hundred years from now, you have to think about how many people are not going to get credit for their work a hundred years from now. The fact is if you start really working at that level you oftentimes are too afraid to do anything, because you are afraid that it’s not going to be good enough, so to the point that many art historians started out as sculptors and painters and didn’t actually pursue it because they were just overwhelmed by the fact that they weren’t ever going to be able to cope or compare to anyone else that got to be famous. My idea is that your best shot is just to work as hard as you can and do whatever you want to do and let art history take care of itself, and that’s worked out pretty well for me.

(AK) What made you decide to take this particular project?

Well, I’d do anything Valerie (basketmaker Valerie Pragnell) said.

(AK) – Ah! She’s like that isn’t she?

She’s my friend.  She said “I want you to come.” I said “All right, I’ll do it”. I made arrangements long enough ahead so that I could fit it into my schedule.

I often find that some of my best projects are buried in the unknown a little bit. I didn’t really know it’s such a distance here from where I live – hard to know what it would be like – would it be successful? I don’t know, maybe it would. It’s been a lot of surprise that we managed to do so well and make something that seems like it’s going to turn out well: it’s got a bit of size to it and everybody’s been pretty happy that they’ve come and been able to work on it, there’s not been too much disgruntlement.

(TR) Have there been differences working in the environment here, such as the climate?

It’s been great.  We’ve actually had lots of good weather; the rain has not really been that much of a deterrent. I’m pretty weather-worthy, generally. I work in every kind of condition. I think of my effort as a problem-solving event: every day we have problems, every day we solve the problems. And so if you look through my work you see that it’s pretty consistent, but none of the sites have been consistent, so being able to pull it out of the bag at the last minute and make sure that it has a kind of validity to it, and that it has a scale and it’s got resonance for the people who are looking at it.

Overall the image that you are trying for is an interesting one played out well. That’s my gift – that I can pull that together time after time, without feeling a lot of anxiety about it and go into new situations within a relatively short period of time. I can’t do it alone: my work generally relies on an organisation as a background to a project. I use their leverage in terms of getting the scaffolding and materials, finding help. I don’t claim that I could do it without that.

Every location has its own challenges. Some organisations are a breath and a prayer and they’re just barely going and other things – museums - are very well established. Sometimes the most established places are the least favoured to work in because they’ve got iron-clad thinking. There’s no room for expansion; it has to be done in such-and-such a way.  They can’t allow anything that odd! So then that hampers you, you really have to try hard to think about something that will be exciting within such rigid parameters. One of the great things about this site is that there are not that many rigid parameters. We had some basic facts we had to take into account, beyond that we were free. So that independence – that Scottish independence - has gotten played out in this work as well.

(TR) In an article I read about you, you said that people keep coming to you and talking about trees, and you get lots of different stories about trees.

That’s true, that’s really true.

(TR) I wondered if it had happened here as well, and what you found with the conversations in different countries whether there was a similarity in what people said about trees in different parts of the world.

One thing is, the way that we’re set up here is not so promotive for that, and let me tell you why: if you have a lot of people on site, the visitors – which we haven’t had that many of – we’ve had some, and we’ve had lots of school children – but, it takes time, and you have to stop and talk to someone, really talk to them and then that’s productive, they always will tell you about their favourite tree.

A lot of times if I’m on the site with one other person I get a lot of feed-back like that because people will just stand and talk to me for a while and eventually they’ll say, “My Mother…..I did…” and we get lots of stories. They don’t really take trees et cetera for granted, they have a real conversation with their environment and interestingly enough a lot of the basket-makers and a lot of the conversations that have gone on here are really kind of celebratory. There’s lots of talk, not prompted by someone, say, let’s talk about the natural world, but there’s a big interest among those folks that have come and are working and a lot of their normal conversation is about the natural world and the landscape that they know, the place they come from and what the landscape features of that place are.

I would say that that is more profound than say in North Carolina where people are not aware of their landscape, they’ve moved to a more urban mentality where the Mall is probably a more significant landmark than where a mountain mass might be or a large tree somewhere, or the way the ocean strikes the shore near my house. You don’t find that conversation comes up so regularly as it does here. And people are very interested in their environment, very interested in clouds, very interested in trees, the way things come together, the mountains come to the shore, the plain, the river, where it is, talking about the river, talking about the various nuances of river/tree/dirt. It may be partly that it’s a rural area or it might be just plain Scotland: that people here are more aware of atmospherics and so they are tied into it more and it becomes more of their daily life.

(TR) Have you had any failures?

I never think of my work as “failure”. I’ve never not been able to do a work. It’s not really ego, but I really think that I’ve always put my best energies into everything I’ve ever done. So if I’ve put my best energies into a work I don’t consider it a failure. I also think that everything I’ve ever made has had a very good reception by the audience it was intended for, who happened by it, but part of it is that I started later in life so all of my experiences counted towards being able to produce something that was viable and you brought it out and then you made it, you could be rigorous enough to pull it off.

I don’t really imagine failures in that way and sometimes when things are not working perfectly I say I’m doing the best I can, given the circumstances I’m in. That attitude of just ploughing ahead and doing the best with what you’ve got within the limitations that are developing and being able to capitalise on in that possibility in terms of “…if not this, then how about that?” has got me through many tight situations where things were falling apart faster than we were able to fix them. We’ve always had credible work that’s come out of it. Sometimes they’re not as photogenic as I would like them to be because it’s more experiential maybe,  if you do something that has more interior than exterior you’re not going to get a great picture of it.

(TR) The interior’s important in your work.

It is. It’s become a convention because I saw how much resonance people had with going into things and seeing the change of scale, when you see it in the environment outside then you walk inside and you imagine, “this is bigger than I thought.”  There’s such a huge interest in that; it causes a lot of stirring in you when you go in and out of things. And you can leave openings where people can see other people in there and it activates the space.

In big public work or work that’s in the public eye, there’s always safety concerns so lots of cross-viewing makes people feel safe. You could build a lot of situations where the people would feel overwhelmed by the sticks or overwhelmed by closure and so the idea is to make something that seems comfortable but is also open enough so that they feel like they’re free. A lot of times it’s a matter of working the surfaces and we’ll get them very tight and then they have to be freed because the forms themselves have to have a sense of freedom and that also helps with the person who’s in there, whether they feel constricted or free. This depends on how the work itself proceeds – so they can make it as if the work is having a release in some way then they feel released more.

(AK) I’m always interested in this dialogue between interior space and exterior space and shape and how the space is contained, the space that the whole installation occupies – all these relationships are really terribly important and whether it’s open and inviting or closed and secretive.

And a lot of these concerns are real basket concerns: the way that something sits its site is not such a big concern because baskets have been mobile generally and are meant to sit in different situations, whereas this thing is really tied to space.  What I will do is I am constantly calculating the views and so I’ll look at it as you come up the way and I’ll say, “Well, this door needs to be this way because people are going to turn this way and so forth, so if you took the same thing and put it another place it wouldn’t look as good, because I’m judging each piece’s size and the relationship to one and another, based on the viewer and how the viewer might feel or how the site is approached; how big the lines have to be, where are you going to start seeing the piece, and where you will start reading your drawing from the outside – it’s all kind of a compromise between lots of flowing factors.

(TR) Where do you go after here?

I’m working in Columbus, Ohio, at the Franklin Park Conservatory, it’s a big botanic garden. I’ve made three pieces there and I’m going to make a fourth. This year I’m making four pieces in one spot. I’ve made a big piece in a Victorian conservatory and another piece in their lobby, a different kind of piece and one outside. I just finished these huge figures, there are nine figures – I lined the staff up, nine people on the staff and took their picture and then made these big portraits outside, hopefully not effigies. It was really funny – I needed to know, if you’re in a photo, people are much closer than you imagine, so when you go to lay something out in the yard, you think – “God, these are squeezing each other up”. But that’s how people stand when they get their portrait made and of course immediately after I got it lined out I forgot that I was making a portrait and just reacted to the figures and how they were going to sit together but it turned out to be hugely successful.

(TR) Is there anywhere that you’d really like to do a piece that you’ve not had a chance to do yet, anywhere in the world?

Well, I think of there being no bad sites. I just think that you have to find something that resonates on that site. I’ve often wanted to open some second-storey windows and pull the trees into the building so that they bent inside, and then work on the tops of the trees in there as a starting point, but that hasn’t presented itself yet. It would make a good piece.

(AK) Let us know if you find one! 

More about Patrick and his work can be found on his website. 

The sculpture is open to the public from June 2006 until May 2007.  Full directions can be found under Events.

Print Discuss