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In love and soaring
but I couldn’t yet, so she could make all kinds of things like giraffes and snakes and all I could do was make big round bears. But that was how I got started.
JH: So that really fired up your interest in sculpture? I know your academic background is in ornithology, and you study hummingbirds in particular, correct? LG: Yeah – I’ve studied humming birds for almost 40 years.
JH: Can you tell me how that actually relates to your work as a sculptor? LG: Well on one level I could say it doesn’t at all, but if I dig a little deeper, it relates on a lot of different levels. For example, I studied movement of hummingbirds in flight. So that made me aware of how animals move through the world, how they use their senses to inform their movement and control motion, which informed my movements as a sculptor. Also, scientists make graphs of everything. We
made 2-D and 3-D graphs and moving graphs with real data. Well, a sculpture is like a graph. And one of the articles you had in the magazine was on digital representations and the use of it in sculpting – that’s another way of saying graphs. Scientists also have to be interested in how materials function - how they behave with respect to temperature – things like that. And of course, sculptors do as well. For example it was fascinating to me to read that Michael Angelo and other sculptors left thin webbing of stone between the arms and the body of ‘David’, for example, to keep it from vibrating until late in the game, and then they knocked the webbing loose. My stone breaks like everybody else’s, but being aware of the mechanical properties of stone and the mechanical properties of tools is very useful.
JH: So that would relate back to a scientific observational approach? LG: Yeah, and just a sensitivity to the kinds of things that make stuff happen in the world.
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