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9
Butler Place . Northampton, MA 01060 .
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I am not trying to change the world with my work; I am trying to move it. |
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In recent years I have been developing increasingly large and more complex site-specific narrative installations in stone and steel. While I work very much in the long tradition of narrative art, still I express myself in my own odd language of image and syntax and these projects invariably function, formally and substantively, on several levels simultaneously. |
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As narrative works they have evolved principally into stories of the human condition, sometimes well known stories and sometimes stories of my own making. As the works grow in size they begin telling many such stories at the same time, story within story, just as our own lives are composed of countless stories within stories. The sculptures themselves are spatially oriented, presenting the narrative in a sense "cinematically" and prompting the viewer to move around them, every step revealing new "scenes", in no particular or necessary order. |
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This story telling and physical movement incorporates time into the work as an inseparable element; they are choreographic and musical. The audience dances with my work without realizing it, subtly and quite naturally, creating their own histories by literally passing time and impressing memories. To view my work is like taking a walk through a city. It is always changing. In spite of the otherwise static nature of the material, the work embodies movement. There is always something new to see, unexpected moments of surprise. |
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I also have an obsession with architecture and the built environment. This undoubtedly comes from my childhood and the environment I was brought up in. At the age of nine I was given a small drafting table for Christmas, a set of drafting tools, sheets of vellum, and basic plans to study and mimic. This was when I started designing in earnest. I was also given architectural blueprint paper, which I exposed in sunlight and developed with water, making an odd little connection between the mechanics of drafting and natural cause and effect, an alchemical fixing of ideas into images, a magical process of transformation and realization. |
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| My father was a designer and commercial artist and when I was born, in the mid-fifties, he and my mother had created and were hosting an enormously successful children's television program, which taught kids drawing and painting. I spent a large part of my infancy on the sidelines of a 1950's television studio, certainly the start of my creative education. In the early sixties my father developed his own version of the wooden building blocks we all played with in school. He called them Arkitek Blocks™, a cornerstone in the product line of an educational toy company he created, Princeton Playthings. These blocks were fundamental in honing my aesthetic awareness, my three-dimensional and spatial comprehension, and were key in beginning my fascination with building. |
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My father's father came from Italy around 1910. Though he was never much of an actual, vital presence (we lived on opposite coasts for most of our lives), he was nonetheless a pivotal figure in my life. I grew up with stories of my grandfather the stonecutter, the church builder, the monument maker, and the carver of angels. I think it was through these stories that I imagined the image of a sculptor, a stone carver, a builder of churches, but I had no idea what that meant really, what that looked like, what that really was, until I was much older and he was many years gone. But a seed had been planted. |
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I eventually went on to enter art school in New York City in the mid-seventies. This is where I started carving stone, quite naively, until I went to Italy myself to see what more I could learn. From college I ultimately went on to study Architecture in graduate school, also in the city. One day, while waiting for the library at school to open, I ventured into the stoneyard at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which was very nearby. I had decided to ask if they needed any carvers, as it was summer and I needed a job. It happened they were looking and after testing my mettle they decided to take me on. So that summer I went to work at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and never returned to school. |
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Now, almost twelve years later, I am on my own, a sculptor, embarking on a project that could take my lifetime to complete, a project that I have been nurturing, unconsciously, for most of my life, my sacred domain, my prayer to God, my Cathedral. |
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Tim de Christopher December 14, 2001 |
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