Phillip Stern

In my sculpture, I am looking to build a new relationship with nature.

The modernist idea was to analyze nature using closed geometric solids—cylinder, sphere, cube and cone. My idea is to experience nature through open forms that describe energy—spiral, wave, and parabola. I also feel that whenever and however we talk about nature, nature is in some sense talking about us. Springing from these ideas, my artwork involves a type of human figure that is nonrepresentational but reflects our deep and distant connections with the natural world. These figures are symbolic, intended to stand-in for the real in much the same way as numbers and other symbols do in math. I am saying "let's suppose..." more than "here's what I see." Let's suppose you elongate and reshape parts of the figure independently; make masses hollow rather than solid, open rather than closed or contained; combine aspects of different species; or substitute a found object for part of the body: then where does that take you?

I see this new relationship as a way for me to participate in nature's grand conversation, and arrive at a satisfying answer for each supposition. In this conversation, intentions must evolve, because nature has something to tell us, as much as we intend to comment upon nature. I begin each sculpture with just an inkling—an intuition of figures and figurative energies, whispered in the ear of my imagination. Shepherding intuitions into sculpture, I trust that such slight notions can survive as physical objects—adapting, mutating and ultimately persisting under pressure from material laws. The goal is always to come up with a better idea of what it is like to be a human being—to tell a new story about being in this bewilderingly complex universe.

           

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