You can’t let a pretty piece of wood overwhelm you,” sculptor Robyn Horn warns.
Unlike artists who look for the shapes hidden in stone, Horn forms her ideas first, then looks for the piece of wood that fits. Even though her work is often monumental, she always has a selection of raw stock from which to choose at her rural home west of Little Rock.
“When you’re excited about making a form, you want to do it right now,” she says.
Form is paramount to Horn, who has been working in her chosen medium for some 30 years - and still says “I lament I didn’t discover wood earlier.” She started turning wood on her brother-in-law’s lathe and found “it just kind of felt right.”
It was really her first venture into art, she says during a conversation at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, although she had a degree in it from Hendrix College.
Horn grew up in a Fort Smith home where “art was always going on,” but it was music - rock ’n’ roll, specifically - that drew her creative attention when she was a teenager. When it came to choosing a college major, she says, she simply thought: “Art? Oh, I can do that. It seemed like the easiest way to graduate.
“Even when I was majoring in art, I didn’t think about being an artist,” she admits. “All of my friends were in education, and I just knew I didn’t want to teach.”
Horn worked in a typesetting house in Little Rock, then in the photo lab for the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism, where she eventually became chief photographer. Along the way, she met husband John, a typesetter, and they tried making stained glass - but Horn couldn’t make it work in three dimensions. It was her brother-in-law’s visit to Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tenn., that brought the lathe to her home and turned her hands to wood.
“At one point, I decided I needed to make something more original than bowls and vases, and I started studying other artists’ work,” she recalls. “My art education began then.”
Horn was most influenced by “Single Form,” a sculpture in front of the United Nations building in New York City.
Created by British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), it was among the earliest abstract sculptures produced in England and helped make Hepworth one of the trendsetters in the genre.
“It just spoke to me,” Horn remembers. “Her forms were very strong - the key component.”
That, she says, led her to consider herself “a formalist” in her structures.
Over the years, Horn has created many series of works, most related to the shapes of stones - geodes, millstones, standing stones and slipping stones, of which “Already Set in Motion,” which stands near the lobby entrance to Crystal Bridges, is one. Created in 2011 of redwood, the 10-foot-tall sculpture “is a reference to stone shapes that appear to be falling,” Horn says. “They appear to be outof balance but are not.”
They also appear to be assembled, she adds, but are actually carved out of one piece of wood.
“It’s fun to mess with the viewer’s mind and let them puzzle over how it’s made,” she says with a chuckle.
Horn say she’s been very fortunate to see her sculptures elevated from craft to art, a status many wood carvers can only dream of achieving. In part, she says, her timing was perfect.
There was a movement in the 1990s when “making things with your hands became revered as more valuable than it had been,” she explains, and that swell of art and craftsmanship provided the context she says curators need. Simply put, work like hers was shown in museums because collectors coveted it.
Now her work is part of collections at Asheville Art Museum in Asheville, N.C.;
Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh; Boston Museum of Fine Arts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans; and the White House Collection of American Crafts at the Clinton Library in Little Rock, as well as at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, Crystal Bridges and the Fort Smith Regional Art Museum.
In 2008, she was named an Arkansas Living Treasure by the Department of Natural Heritage.
“It makes you feel kind of old,” she says with another chuckle. “But it was an honor to be chosen.”
In her early 60s, Horn has accepted that working with giant slabs of wood might not be possible forever, and she has begun to paint heavily layered abstracts in acrylic that once again put form first.
“The progression of my painting happened more quickly because I had an established aesthetic,” she says.
But she’s not leaving carving behind just yet. She has a good physical therapist, all that wood in the storage building, a student to help her - and a forklift. She and her husband, who collects old printing presses, bought it for each other as an anniversary present.
“It was the best thing we ever did,” she says.
GO & DO ‘Already Set in Motion’ By Robyn Horn
What: A 120-inch-tall sculpture of redwood with black dye, created in 2011
Where: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, installed near the main lobby entrance on Sept. 26, 2011
Read More: robynhorn.com or crystalbridges.org.
Style, Pages 29 on 07/25/2013