Chinese
New Year is near and with it also its celebration worldwide to
welcome the year of the horse. Precisely for that reason the British
sculptor James Doran-Webb has created a big sculpture for the
ceremonies at Singapore. Each one of this horses weighs 500kg,
supporting the weigh of up to four persons, and it took a total of
six month to make this puzzles of more than 400 pieces of driftwood,
even having an interior skeleton of stainless steel.
Driftwood
sculptor is how Doran-Webb defines himself, but his relationship with
this material started long before than his artistic career as his
parents had an antique restoration workshop and he owned a little
weekend stand on Portobello Road's market (London) when he was a
teenager.
In
1989 he travelled to the Philippines, where popular art and culture
of the archipelago awakened in him an interest for the work with
driftwood. This wood from trees of various species come to the rivers
ans beaches banks, washed and processed by the waves and salinity,
and making each single peace, whatever its size, a particular and
individual form the rest.
The
next year, in 1990, Doran-Webb started to import to Europe thanks to
a design company: boxes and frames inlaid with shells or marbles,
papier-mâché animals and some furniture made from recicled
wood from the Philippine houses. However it wasn't until the
beginning of the 2000 decade when he thought about designing
furniture directly with driftwood.
It
was playing with driftwood pieces for that furniture how he end up
making his first animal sculpture. Later on the big amount of
driftwood he had available allowed him to make works of different
sizes, just playing and combining the forms and characteristics of
each one of the pieces to give movement and vitality to his
creations.
The
very first thing we should say about James Doran-Webb work is the
double game, thus from far in the distance it seems like what you see
is an animal, or at least a uniform bloc of mass, but when you
approach the sculpture you can observe how the whole is made from
hundreds of little parts, and even the driftwood colors are used to
enhance the artistic quality. It is also very interesting this step
forward from furniture to animal sculptures, because that way nature
is no longer a tool serving the human kind for its pleasure and
commodity, it becomes an expression of itself. With nature it is
created another representation of nature, in a way that we could also
include here atomic theories: this little parts of wood become one
thing or another depending on how are they combined between them.
Finally, the fact of creating only animals gives vitality to his
productions. The main material for his artworks is wood – wood than
once was part of a living being but has went to a process of death
and transformation – but from this material we only get again
representations of living beings. So in some way that death wood get
an allegorical second life: a life, in that case, engaged to beauty
and art.
Ricard Gispert
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