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Greenport
sculptor finds anchor
for nautical motif
BY DEIDRE STEIN GREBEN
Special
to Newsday
September 15, 2006
Sculptor
Arden Scott uses no mirrors when she makes, or rather, builds
her self-portraits. Fashioned from such mundane materials as
twigs, bronze mesh, stones and steel, they do not bear any
outward resemblance to the lean, curly-haired 68-year-old artist.
Like Jim Dine's bathrobes and Deborah Butterfield's horses,
Scott's boats stand as metaphors for the artist - vessels for
her thoughts, moods, memories and dreams.
A seasonal rigger at a local boatyard near her home in Greenport, Scott has dedicated
some 20 years to the motif. Nautical shapes surfaced even in her early abstract
works from the 1960s and '70s, when she was scavenging Dumpsters in lower Manhattan
for discarded sails and timbers.
Six
of Scott's seafaring craft - suspended from the ceiling,
mounted on the wall or elevated on platforms - drift across
Dowling College's Anthony Giordano Gallery, presenting an
ocean of emotion, form and poetic allusion. There are undercurrents
of writers Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson (from whose poetry
Scott borrows the title of her 2003 piece "some Wednesday
afternoon") and Hart Crane, as well as sculptors David
Smith and Julio González.
From the metal-ribbed belly of the 21-foot-long "infinite
pacifics"
(2003) to the twisting bronze rods that describe the mast and
flapping sail of "Taxi Wardance" (2005), her sculptures
reflect her intimate understanding of boats. They also document
her aesthetic and personal voyages over the past decade.
With their open, skeletal frames, the vessels allow themselves
to be filled with our own associations. We can change course
- often a tricky proposition, as emphasized by the thorny locust
branches that make up the hull of the Nordic-inspired "Ita" (1997),
hung from a network of near-invisible wires that cause it to
swivel with the air currents. Or we can hover close to the edge
in "straight North beyond" (2000), an ephemeral assemblage
of diaphanous cloth, screening and pins, with long bamboo shoots
balancing precariously across its prow, signaling the instability
presented by turning tides.
While "some Wednesday afternoon" takes passengers on
a modern journey with its fluid yet economical contours, "Taxi
Wardance,"
sporting the gracefully curved bow of a Viking ship, transports
us to another place and time. We can travel through the ages
in these patinated gondolas, canoes and skiffs, or even ride
the carcasslike boats to the afterlife.
At once intricate and primitive, fierce and fragile, historical
and timeless, personal and accessible, Scott's paradoxical vessels
infuse one of the oldest genres - maritime art - with new buoyancy.
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