Planting Seeds For Art

Come May of next year, the front of the Walton Arts Center will blossom into a unique sculpture created by North Carolina artist Patrick Dougherty.

It might, at first glance, look like round bales of hay like “Out of the Box,” currently on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art. It might look like a leaning village of woven huts - the kind you’d expect to see in Middle-earth - like the installation he created for the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond, Va. It might look like giant pitchers pouring water into a reflecting pool at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Wash. It might even look like giant people, like “Nine Lives,” created at the Franklin Park Conservatory in Columbus, Ohio.

What this sculpture, commissioned by the Walton Arts Center to celebrate its Artosphere festival, will look like depends on many things, Dougherty said during a scouting trip to Fayetteville last week. The artist is engaged in a dialogue with himself and with the location, the materials, the people helping him - even the mundane details like whether he needs scaffolding and whether it’s available when he needs it - and the result, he says, is what those elements dictate. Whatever it is, it will be one of a kind, as is Dougherty’s career.

In spite of his fascination with wood, Dougherty didn’t start life as an artist, a lumberjack or a gardener. He was a health administrator. But perhaps, he muses, his passion for interacting with nature came from time spent on the farm with his grandparents.

“You’re connected in a very special way with the land,” hesays. “You have to be - just to avoid getting bitten by a snake!”

By the time he was 30, Dougherty had his own “farmette.”

“My dream was to build a house,” he told The New York Times in a 2010 interview. “I didn’t realize my real dream, my sub-current, was to become a sculptor.”

At 36, he went back to school at the University of North Carolina, entering the master’s program in art.

His first sapling sculpture surprised his instructors, he remembers. As he told The Times, they thought “it was too complete for someone who’d been blundering around in the netherworld.”

Now in his mid-60s, Dougherty has completed more than 200 sculptures around the world, supported in his passion by his wife, Linda Johnson Dougherty, chief curator and curator of contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Their son, Sam, is 17 and assisted his dad on two sculptures this summer in France and Italy.

“I don’t think the long days endeared him to sculpture,” Dougherty says. “His current interest is in farming.”

Dougherty does as many as half a dozen pieces a year, and he says letting go of them is nothing like watching his child make college visits, something that started this year.

“It’s inevitable,” he says of the process. “These sculptures have great homes. By the time I’m done with one, I’ve met the community and have a goodfeel for that place. It’s just like what you do: You’re not sitting around, rereading old stories.

You’re writing new ones.”

Each sculpture starts, he says, “with the way I felt when I first saw the site.” Each one ends, as the Artosphere sculpture will, before his creation woven of local saplings ceases to be “pleasurable, interesting, provocative.” What it means is up to those who see it.

“I try not to lay too heavy of a trip on the viewer,” Dougherty says. “A good sculpture causes a lot of associations for people. It has relevance in their lives.”

“His aesthetic is perfect for Artosphere,” says Jodi Beznoska, WAC vice president of communications. “His blending of art and nature and sustainability is a perfect match for the festival.”