DOUG MAKEMSON - ArtInPlace

I am posting regularly on the recent placement of the 2008-2009 ArtInPlace public sculptures along the byways of Charlottesville. Please follow me in this series as I give you a little tour...

Almost all the raw material Georgia sculptor Doug Makemson uses to create his pieces is recycled from businesses, scrap yards, and farming activities.  From implied motions, Doug brings the animals he creates to life from these discarded hunks of unwanted metal.  As Doug says: “I have always been fascinated by animals, their infinite variety of form, their movement, their inner life. I have also always been a collector of interesting bits and pieces of metal, parts of machines, mysterious shapes and weights of known or unknown origin. My sculpture is a fusion of these two lifelong interests.”

In Doug’s AIP entry this year, Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm No More, we get a thoroughly thought out and well executed work of art.  Specifically, Doug says this about the piece:

Strong and willing horses were the backbone of agriculture for centuries.  Their old steel plows and other equipment now lay about the landscape rusting, mute testimony to the forgotten labor of generations of horses and farmers.  In the shapes of the metal I began to see the form of the horses that toiled so many years tilling the soil.  I like the historical connection between the horse, the sculptural material, and those who worked the land before me.  I think this horse is energized by the history of these artifacts and the knowledge that it has become the plows, is free to run forever and will never have to work on Maggie's farm again.

Or perhaps the plows are amazed to become the horse, free at last from the impeding earth.

The horse's back legs and neck are turning plows, the front legs are singletrees, the head and rump are parts of a seeder, and the ribs are cultivators.  The upturned hoof is a nod to the modern world, a piece of crushed car wheel, and there are two pickaxes in the shoulders to add the energy of the working man.

Located on Elliot Avenue and Burnett (not far off Ridge Street), make sure you stop the car and get out to see this one up close.  You’ll get a huge appreciation for the hundreds of individual pieces of metal that make up this magnificent horse.  Each had a previous, identifiable life of its own, but now they all have been brought together to form a new being.  A new life from the old.  A renewed life.

Comments

[Barbara]

Rob:

I've come to look forward to your descriptions and accompanying photos of "ArtInPlace." Art in a public setting. How extraordinary! Thanks for keeping us all alert.

Best regards,

Barbara