Jack Shadbolt Driftwood Sculpture from 1979: Three-Dimensional Painting
Since the sixties, Shadbolt had made sculptures from driftwood, releasing the organic energy of shapes found in nature. At the end of the summer of 1979 on Hornby Island, Shadbolt expanded this series.
Shadbolt explains, “I have produced a body enough of work of an experimental nature to build myself a sculptural mythology of my own – a body of familiars which establishes a convincing statement of my inner self…. It has been my intention to wrest them out of natural forms by cutting them and painting them into an abstract state of fetish presence that includes the suggestibility of the original but takes the final image far beyond that into an autonomous reality of its own.” [1]
Driftwood sculptures as the subject of multipanel work
Watson, Scott. Jack Shadbolt. Douglas and McIntyre, 1990, p. 183.
Moving the driftwood into its own autonomous realm, he had to adjust and modify the organic energy and flow, just as he did in one of his paintings: “I first sever the shapes ‘found’ from nature by cutting them across to terminate their ‘organic’ flow and compress their ‘energy.’ I may even add pieces or cut away unwanted elements. When I have satisfied myself as to the self-contained character and expressive quality of their whole configuration I now paint them black and white, totally, to further remove them from naturalness.” Finally, the works were painted in colour as “three-dimensional paintings.”
Morning Deck #2, 1980
Acrylic and conte on watercolour board
7 panels, 60" x 40" each
Image from the Equinox Gallery
Close Up: Panel 4 of 7 from "Morning Deck #2"
The resulting sculptures relate thematically to his paintings in the late seventies, relying on wild abandon with a strong fetish element. [2] “I want a kind of dangerous art,” he wrote, “risking the daemonic – a form emerging out of chaos like a rare seas monster surfacing from the deep throwing off spume, breathing the air.”
These sculptures became the subject of a mural-size multi-panel work, “Morning Deck #2 1980” [3]. In this work, select driftwood sculptures are shown in a row on his deck at Horny Island, overlooking a field.
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[1] Halpin, “Entry from Jack Shadbolt’s Journal, 9 July 1985” in Jack Shadbolt
[2] Watson, Scott. Jack Shadbolt. Douglas and McIntyre, 1990, p. 184.
[3] Equinox Gallery, “Jack Shadbolt, Mocking Deck #2, 1980”
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