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JOCK HILDEBRAND IN CONVERSATION WITH
BALTIMORE SCULPTOR CHRIS BATHGATE
JOCK: Chris, can you tell me a little bit about how you came to do the kinds of sculpture you do? CHRIS: I did attend art school very briefly, but I was quite motivated to create a very specific kind of work and the ‘try everything’ aspects of college never really appealed to me very much. I made the decision quickly to drop out and pursue my work pretty much on my own. What I did originally was work odd jobs and I’d pick up tools here and there and I started doing a lot of welding work…torch welding and grinding, making very organic shapes. A recurring theme was making forms that had certain lines of symmetry comparable to living creatures, like animals, and I would try to make a shape that had some kind of uncanny resemblance, because you could relate to it as something alive based purely upon its lines of symmetry.
I started mixing in a lot
of geometric forms so I basically just kept pursuing that line of thought and I started adding contrast between very geometric shapes and very fluid curvy forms; and that contrast kind of shifted drastically to just geometric shapes once I started picking up my own machining equipment. I bought a small milling machine and a lathe around 2004 and quickly became captivated with the process of machine work. So from there I started this long process of self-teaching because machine work is very complicated and very intricate and requires a lot of minute attention to details and minute processes. My work from that point on grew out of self education in machine work and different machine processes and I tried to incorporate a lot of those ideas into the work itself.
J: I am interested in a number of things – one of them is that you were talking about starting originally with biological bi- symmetrical forms and now you’ve pretty much moved away from it, right? C: Yeah – the symmetry thing still plays a part in the work that I do. Obviously if you look at the work itself it’s all very
PAGE 7SUMMER 2011
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