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sculpture

    IN THE STUDIO

    Rehab El Sadek Sculpts a Story of Political Dislocation

    Discarded books and gauze hold a place for whispered words

    By

    Rehab El Sadek has made herself at home since arriving in Provincetown this past October as a visual arts fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center.

    Rehab El Sadek in her studio at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    The vibe in her narrow studio is equal parts industrious and homey. She has divided the space with a sheer curtain; behind it is a desk where her partner, an arts administrator and writer, can also work. The couple have adopted a cat, and El Sadek says they’re getting married this month at Race Point Beach.

    She’s also found a sense of family in the other fellows, often cooking for them. “They are like my children,” says El Sadek of the other artists and writers, many of whom are a generation younger than her. “As somebody who became an immigrant at an older age, I don’t have community here, so I go to residencies to know people and know other artists,” she says.

    El Sadek, who is originally from Egypt, has been based in Austin, Texas for 17 years. She moved there with her son and now ex-husband so that he could complete a master’s degree. “Every time we went back to Egypt, we thought we would stay, but Egypt became harder and harder for a family,” says El Sadek.

    8, 9, 12, 13, a sculpture by El Sadek. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    Her artwork — which encompasses sculpture, painting, and installation — has been a way for her to process the immigrant experience and grapple with understanding American culture.

    “It’s really hard when you don’t understand where you are, especially when your work is social,” she says. In Egypt, her work addressed topics such as gender and the history of stolen artifacts — social issues tethered to the context of the culture. In America, El Sadek had to find a home not just for herself but also for her art.

    In the front of her studio hangs a sculpture composed of a book stripped of its pages. It’s placed vertically and partially covered with gauze that hangs from the bottom like folds of loose skin. On one of the inner covers, El Sadek repeatedly stitched the phrase “hush.” It’s a delicate touch, matching the auditory softness of the word but contrasting with the grime and violence of the destroyed book.

    For El Sadek, it reflects her deep unease with honestly expressing herself. “I have been afraid to communicate how I feel, especially politically,” she says. “Not everybody accepts your opinions.”

    Hush, a sculpture by Rehab El Sadek. (Photo courtesy Rehab El Sadek)

    When El Sadek arrived in Provincetown in the fall and the violence in Israel and Gaza began, she was struck anew by the dissonance between her political opinions and those of many Americans. She participated in demonstrations with other FAWC fellows against the war.

    “There were people with visas with us,” she says. “ ‘What if something happens?’ we thought. Of course, nothing happened in Provincetown, but it brings up all this awareness about vulnerability. I’ve been feeling that for years and years.”

    This sense of cultural and political homelessness eased somewhat this past year when El Sadek received her American citizenship. “I am less worried when I sleep at night,” she says.

    During her fellowship, books — which she has used intermittently in making art since 1997 — have served as her primary material. She picks them up at thrift shops and in the discard pile at the library and starts stapling, hammering, and gluing pages together.

    On a wall in her studio, she displays a group of finished sculptures. Some are no longer legible as books, like A Day Over the Night | A Night Over the Day, stained red with pigments she brought back from Egypt. It looks like a rock or archaeological fragments held together with strands of gauze. Other sculptures maintain their forms as books but are materially transformed. Delicate pages congeal into hard, cement-like forms. Other books feel light and airy, entombed in white plaster or layers of gauze.

    A Day Over the Night | A Night Over the Day, a sculpture by Rehab El Sadek. (Photo by Abraham Storer)

    Gauze is the one material that seems to appear in all her artwork. “I’ve been using gauze for a long time because it’s really beautiful and has layers of meaning related to protection and restoration,” says El Sadek.

    It’s also a reference to her culture. She locates the roots of her creative practice in a visit to a room in the Cairo Museum with ancient Egyptian sarcophagi. She was struck by the materials and colors, the designs on the coffins, and the mummified bodies delicately wrapped in gauze.

    The books she collects — written in English and bearing titles like The Diffusion of Power — are a reference to her present and her past. She grew up the daughter of a public relations officer for the Egyptian government in a home outside Alexandria filled with books.

    “Reading was my entertainment,” says El Sadek. The books — like her family’s worldliness and later her art education at Alexandria University — became a portal to a broad understanding of culture.

    Mother | Child, a painting by El Sadek. (Photo courtesy Rehab El Sadek)

    In America, the books she finds are keys to understanding American culture, but she transforms them into something that belongs to her. She challenges their authority, leaving some pages legible but covering others with gauze, soil from her homeland, and the Arabic script of her native language.

    “I can use the book form to tell a story that is autobiographical,” says El Sadek, “but not just about myself — about immigration.”

    El Sadek says that when she goes back to Egypt now she feels as if she doesn’t fully belong there. “When you leave your own country, you hold onto the past,” she says. “The Egypt I remember is from 17 years ago, but the culture is moving.”

    The books exist in a similar state. There’s plenty of nostalgia in her surfaces, but it’s displaced from its origin and transposed onto a foreign substrate. In El Sadek’s sculptures, beauty, cultural expression — and maybe a sense of home — exist in forms of hybridity.

    Forms of Hybridity

    The event: A showcase with fellows Rehab El Sadek and Sasha Wortzel
    The time: Friday, April 19, 5 to 8 p.m.
    The place: Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl St., Provincetown
    The cost: Free

    SCULPTURE

    Timothy Horn Turns a Passion for Jewelry Into Monumental Art

    His natural forms evoke environmental awareness and fairy tales

    By

    Imagine traveling in a Cinderella carriage made of crystalized rock sugar. Or dancing under a translucent silicone chandelier, nine feet wide, in the shape of an enormous glowing jellyfish. These sculptural works populate the dreamlike world created by Australian-born artist Timothy Horn, who now calls Truro home.

    Timothy Horn’s Tree of Heaven 7 is about 6 by 4 feet and made from nickel-plated bronze and mirrored blown glass. It’s currently at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. (Photo Saul Steed)

    Blurring boundaries between fairy tale fantasy and visions of the natural world, Horn encourages viewers to question what lies under the surface of decorative objects. His work has been shown at major museums and galleries, including the de Young in San Francisco, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

    He is fascinated by the extravagance of the Baroque period and, in particular, 17th-century jewelry designs, which he sees as echoing nature’s forms. “If the Renaissance represents solidity and symmetry, the Baroque, by contrast, is like looking at cabbages or lettuces that have gone through all stages of growth to where they start to bulk and go crazy,” Horn says. “I’ve always loved that desperate, last burst of energy.”

    Drawn by the allure of jewelry at a young age, Horn went to Victoria College in Prahran, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia, intending to become a jewelry artist. “But I felt boxed in and restrained in the jewelry department,” he says. “I couldn’t play with materials. I realized that I liked the scale of sculpture more.” Still, he adds, “Jewelry always remained, lurking there in the background.”

    After college, Horn spent five years in Europe. While living in Paris, teaching English with his “heart not in it,” he visited the Louvre nearly every day, drawing 17th-century jewelry and Baroque ornamental objects. Returning to Australia, Horn went for a second undergraduate degree, at the Australian National University, to learn how to work with glass.

    Horn’s 10-foot-long Mother-Load, made of crystalized rock sugar, plywood, and steel, is at the Renwick Gallery. It’s inspired by the life of San Francisco socialite Alma Spreckels, whose husband made his fortune in sugar. (Photo courtesy Timothy Horn)

    “Glass is such a seductive material,” he says. “I was playing with form as a sculptor and wanted to introduce elements of transparency and translucency into my work.”

    As he expanded his skills with materials, Horn began to appreciate the parallels between decorative art, which he calls the “poor cousin” to fine art, and the psychological struggles of being a gay man, dealing with rejection and longing to find acceptance and love.

    “There was something about the language of the decorative that felt political to me as a gay man marginalized by the mainstream,” he says. “This became the place to start finding answers of my own — the diving off point.”

    He moved to Boston to get his M.F.A. in sculpture at MassArt in 2004, and there discovered the collection of glass models by 19th-century father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Fascinated by the Blaschkas’ collection of jellyfish, anemones, sea slugs, and other maritime invertebrates, Horn began to include sea creatures in his designs.

    Horn’s Medusa, made of silicone, copper tubing, and fiber optics, was created during his fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. (Photo courtesy Timothy Horn)

    “The sea has always been very present for me,” Horn says. “I grew up in Melbourne, but my folks also had a house down the coast, on a long, skinny piece of land very similar to Cape Cod called Mornington Peninsula. So, the first time I came to the Cape, it felt very familiar. I remember walking down the beach, finding jellyfish that had been washed up. I think that memory, and then, seeing those glass sea creatures, eventually led to me to make a series of jellyfish.”

    Horn was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2005-2006, and, while he was there, he created three large-scale translucent chandelier sculptures in the form of jellyfish, using silicone rubber cast in forms and stitched together using fishing line. Both magical and menacing, they are an ode to a seemingly indestructible force of nature.

    A trip to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 2008 with his partner, writer Art Corriveau, gave Horn a contrasting awareness of nature’s fragility, and brought a strong environmental focus to his work.

    Australian-born artist Tim Horn now lives and works in Truro. (Photo Art Corriveau)

    “As a seven-year-old, I found the reef mind-blowing — it really left an impression on me,” he says. “Then, as an adult, seeing the first signs of coral bleaching, I felt Australia was not doing enough to avert this disaster.” Spurred by the damage wrought by climate change, Horn began to work with coral patterns, embodying large-scale jewelry designs in these delicate natural forms.

    Currently, Horn is one of four artists included in “Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020,” an exhibit at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., until July 2021. (Due to the recent Covid surge, the Renwick is closed temporarily, but the exhibit can be experienced online at americanart.si.edu/visit/renwick.)

    The collision between the natural world and our culture, Horn says, “is essential to what I am trying to get at in my artistic work. Where are we at? Is this the end? Are we going to be able to get it together to save ourselves and our planet? Or are we going to remain locked in denial?”

    GALLERIES

    Paul Bowen Washes Back Ashore in Provincetown

    A show of new work reflects his roots here and abroad

    By

    “The beach used to smell like hell,” sculptor Paul Bowen says. He is seated at a workbench in his studio on the top floor of a rugged barn that was once used for storing hay and lumber in Williamsville, Vt. Bowen is recalling a day in Provincetown in the 1980s when a whale washed ashore within shouting distance of MacMillan Wharf. Bowen was then a year-rounder, an inveterate hunter of wooden fragments that were abundant along the backshore and bay, including pine slats used for packing fish. He had come to Provincetown in the mid-1970s for a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship and because of its reputation as an artist colony.

    Paul Bowen in his Vermont studio. The wall-mounted sculptures are Old Root (top) and Wedges Stack. (Photo courtesy Paul Bowen)

    Bowen, a bard in the Celtic tradition, has brought up the beached whale as part of the backstory for Flense, one of the dozen-plus small-scale sculptures of his in a show opening this weekend at Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown. On that day in the ’80s, he was photo-documenting a crew from the New England Aquarium as they performed a whale necropsy. They began by removing the coal black top layer of whale skin, Bowen says, a procedure that is called flensing, the first step in processing whale blubber into oil.

    The material components of Flense are straightforward: four thick bands of coal black fabric, mounted on a wooden board. Bowen’s titles are not to be taken literally — they serve as pathways to richer meanings.

    “When I lived in Provincetown, I didn’t drive,” he says. “I carried each piece of wood by hand, or on my bike, to the studio. I could walk the backshore, pass by hundreds of pieces of wood, and choose maybe two. I’d have a relationship with every piece.”

    Many of those relics came with him to Vermont. “My house,” he says, partially in jest, “is filled to the rafters with wood. I often work on many pieces at the same time. A lot of the work ends up on the wall, on the workbench, on the floor. Because there are all these boxes of wood, inevitably — accidentally — something gets dropped, and often, something better happens than what I have been working on. I will seize that moment and pursue it.”

    Bowen moves on to Dowser, another work in his Merola gallery show. In the process of making it, he turned two separate sculptures into a twinned and layered unit, 20 inches across. The top layer of Dowser tilts upward to the left. It has two ovals: one glides over a partial circle of black, suggesting dark water meeting the horizon line. The other opens to raw wood and “butterfly” shapes, a signature element, alluding to furniture-making before metal joints. Choreographed with a painter’s eye — Bowen was transitioning from painting to sculpture when he studied at Maryland Institute College of Art — the wingspan of the topmost butterfly is painted bright white, animating the surface.

    Materials steeped in history remain Bowen’s creative North Star: the base layer of Dowser is a breadboard from his family home in Wales. “I like that kind of connection,” he says. “The thing you always hope for is to allow the material to make itself the way it’s always wanted to be.”

    Dowser, by Paul Bowen, composed of fabric, wood, oil paint, and gesso, is part of his show at the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown. (Photo Albert Merola Gallery)

    Bowen’s Welsh origins — he was born there in 1951 — remain a powerful influence. Artist slide shows he used to give at FAWC would open with shots of Colwyn Bay, the seaside resort town where he grew up. Black tar would wash up, often attached to floating pieces of wood, and Bowen’s sculptures once incorporated petroleum-based material, now known to be toxic, that approximates that dense tar. Today, to get opaque blacks, he will hand-paint fabrics, or use a black plumber’s glue. His Merola show, “Tar Flats,” refers to the old practice of fishermen tarring their nets on the beach.

    Another piece, Wedges Stack, is named for its multiple layers of triangular shapes, which look as if they were tossed in a game of pick-up sticks and positioned as they landed. The wood, Bowen says, drifted in from the area around MacMillan Wharf, a by-product of pier construction.

    “I may work on things over a very long period of time,” Bowen says. “Certain parts take a long time to get to the place where you’re done. Often, it’s the nature of the wood. Unlike working in marble or steel, wood is a mutable medium, reflecting the history of its own ebb and flow, the contours of the land, the pull of the tides.”

    Bowen lived and worked in Provincetown for three decades. He showed at Long Point Gallery, DNA, and ArtStrand. Since 2014, he’s been at Merola. He and writer Pamela Mandell met at FAWC, when Mandell was an administrator and Bowen was the visual arts coordinator. They married in 2000. They moved in 2005, when year-round living and studio space in Provincetown became unsustainable.

    Welsh Wheel, by Paul Bowen. (Photo Albert Merola Gallery)

    Bowen reconnects with the Outer Cape each summer, teaching at FAWC and the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. Locally, his work is in the collections of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Cape Cod Museum of Art, and, nationally, he’s in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

    Bowen credits his roots here with anchoring a productive life. “All the good things that have happened to me — materials, career, friendships, and a supportive gallery — happened because of Provincetown,” he says. “My house is full of Provincetown things.”

    Wood as Muse

    The event: “Tar Flats,” artwork by Paul Bowen

    The time: Friday, Aug. 14, through Sept. 2; Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., and by appointment (508-487-4424)

    The place: Albert Merola Gallery, 424 Commercial St., Provincetown

    The cost: Free

    OUTER CAPE PORTRAIT

    Mike Wright: A Piece of the Sky

    By

    MIKE WRIGHT  |  SCULPTOR  |  PROVINCETOWN

    I’ve been making sculpture with old found painted wood for 30 years now. In the mid-’90s I would be walking on the beach and trying to search for my materials like the old salvagers used to when there were wrecks washed up on the beach.

    After major storms in the winter, I would hike out and find these great pieces of broken up old little boats and things. Maybe a shape would catch my eye, or the quality of the paint that was left on it after the wood’s been floating around in the sea and scrubbed by the waves in the sand and the salt. It had to have a patina that was exceptional, something that I could not create.

    That lasted awhile. And then something changed. The wooden boats of the fishing fleet had disappeared. I had to resort to a different way of collecting. I drive a circuit around Provincetown in my Jeep, and I look between buildings and find what was the old funky Provincetown.

    Now, there’s another element, too: dumpsters. One day I drove past what was Robert Motherwell’s house. It was being renovated by a new owner. The dumpster had just arrived, and there were some wonderful blue pieces of wood in there that Motherwell had painted himself. I asked and begged if I could please go into the dumpster and pick out some pieces of this fabulous Motherwell blue.

    Motherwell blue really is like a piece of the sky. It’s just soft blue, but very vibrant. I try and add a little Motherwell blue and sneak it into all kinds of things that I create.

    From years of collecting wood, I’ve got a good supply still, but it is starting to dwindle. The thing that I’m noticing now is that the dumpsters don’t offer much in the way of colorful painted wood. When the artists owned a lot of the houses, they would paint everything — the floorboards, the cabinets, the closets and doors, so you could find lots of fun colorful wood in the dumpsters. But that seems to be changing now that houses are renovated and the renovations are getting renovated. There’s what I call the “beiging of Provincetown,” where the wood colors are white, brown, gray, beige.

    As an artist, I believe that I will always be driven to make something. To be making. So, if I pass 10 years out, will I still have enough materials? Absolutely. Yeah, that would be a wonderful goal: to just keep making until the end.

    I live in Provincetown with my partner, Sheila McGuinness, and my two Boston Terrors, I call them, Kibbe and Kami. Life is good. I can’t be in a better place than I am right now. I am making art, eating vegetables from the garden, looking at my dahlias, and walking my dogs on the beach.

    Listen to a four minute recording of Mike here. 

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