THERE IS SOMETHING GORGEOUS and boundlessly strange about the cantilever. Anchored at one end while the other extends freely into space, unsupported, untethered, it relies on the strength, the rigidity, the integrity of the single support.
Will has spent a good part of his life exploring the possibilities of this form. At the heart of his work is a restless, relentless curiosity. What he has learned about balance, about surprise, and about equilibrium is the stuff of art.
When you talk to him, he is at once fully engaged in the conversation. But half of you thinks he’s just wanting to get back to his work. I understand that. — OL
How old were you when this fascination began? Do you remember?
Three. I have clear memories, it’s like a bodily memory.
What does that mean?
Well, it means I remember the feeling of the boxes in my hands. I remember the sensation of stacking them on top of each other. And I even remember the sound that they would make when they’d come crashing down. Because even then, I was making these improbable structures and pushing the limits of what these blocks and gravity and the form could do, and I would build these skyscrapers taller than me, and then cantilever them out a little bit, and then everything would come crashing down, and that was all part of it. And that’s deep inside of me still.
When you say pushing the limits, you’re playing with cantilevers, right?
Yeah. Physics. Cantilevers. I mean, I didn’t know physics back then; I didn’t know engineering. I was three, but I could feel all these qualities that later I would learn are engineering challenges answered by physics. Five-year-old Will was just doing it by experience, doing it by feel, doing it by touch, those were my toys. I never had Hot Wheels or superheroes. I was always just building with these blocks.
Fast forward — how did you pursue it?
I never stopped. I never stopped doing that, basically. I think I was really lucky to have tremendously supportive parents who never pushed me to stop playing and who kept everything I ever made.
When I had to take my high school physics class, that was actually where the first early version of what I’m doing now came out. In physics class we all got an assignment one day. The teacher said, Come back tomorrow with something that balances but looks like it shouldn’t.
I had this box of wooden pieces, more organic, non-standardized. I grabbed three pieces, and without really thinking about it, I did this in five minutes. Went to school. In class, I tinkered around with them and figured out how the three pieces would go together and stand on a little foot. A seed was planted.
And then you went away to college.
I was at Stanford and they had this great woodshop, bronze foundry, machine shop. I made tables, I made some sculptures. Sometimes I’d find some way to create a piece that would double as a homework assignment, but sometimes I was just doing it because I needed to. I couldn’t keep my head in a book.
And then what?
I got a job at an environmental sustainability think tank in Colorado. I was always interested in the cross-pollination of different fields. People and built structures and science of the environment.
But you were interested in structures. It seems like something you liked so much… you didn’t do art because you were afraid you’d fall for it?
I think that’s true. I didn’t want to have what I was doing get corrupted by the market or the need to pay a mortgage.
But I started doing sculpture work, just as a hobby. I was showing work at a gallery, but really only working weekends and occasional evenings. And then I had a sculpture exhibit at Gerald Peters in the fall. It was the spring, and there was one day where I just realized that when I looked at my recent past I didn’t feel like I was spending my life the way I wanted to spend it.
And so I was still scared of the idea of putting all my eggs in that basket and relying on trying to be an artist to make a living. But I said, Okay, I’m gonna give myself six months. I’m gonna give it my all. I’m gonna quit, I’m not gonna think about a job, I’m just gonna put everything I have into this show.
And that was it. I mean, it was good timing, good luck. I was able to go from there to another show, to another show, and it’s been almost 20 years now.
What fascinates you about wood?
Wood has always been my favorite material. Mostly hardwoods now, at this point in my career. They have strength, but also the beauty. They’re denser. Something like pine, if I used pine in the structures that I’m building, it would slowly give way over time, and it wouldn’t hold up to the rigors. And in fact, nowadays, I actually have to add strength to the wood through different means. I laminate carbon fiber in sometimes, or Kevlar, using certain types of wood that happen to have a stronger grain.
It’s always a dance with the materials, and what I’m trying to create. Which is a very small foot where the piece comes in contact with the ground. And then from there, it goes up into space, and then through simple interlocking joints. There’s no nails, no glue. It’s just a hole chiseled into one end of a piece and a thinner element that goes into that hole and extends out.
And so that’s the cantilever, when an element extends out far beyond the other elements. The weight is in a very small space. To do that, you have to have a structure that doesn’t break on that one place. It doesn’t break, doesn’t bend over time. And it has to have equilibrium, it has to counterbalance.
What makes a successful sculpture?
I want to make viewers pause and catch their breath. There’s a sensation inside the body that I’m really interested in tapping into, because we all understand this idea of balance and we are out in space, walking around, occasionally falling over. That’s like a human experience of being in space subject to gravity in these bodies of ours.
I’m using intuition, I’m not using any calculations when I’m making these pieces. It’s just an intuition I’ve built over time. But we all have that in us because we all understand, even just visually, if you look at a big log sticking out over a stream, and suddenly, what’s holding that log up underneath gives way. We know that’s gonna fall down. There’s a physical understanding of that.
We don’t have to have ever taken a physics class to understand that. And so I like to push the limits of that understanding inside of us by creating these forms that one might think won’t balance, but that do. There’s like a tension that it creates inside of the viewer, where there’s both a satisfaction because you can see that it balances and there’s also this question — how?
What I’m trying to do is get people out of their minds. The art world today has a lot of — I’m gonna get into trouble for saying this — but there’s a tendency to intellectualize art right now. And there’s a place for that, and my own work has an intellectual side to it, but I really try to bring in humanity, the emotions, the physical. These pieces are tangible, physical objects. That’s one reason I love sculpture, why I didn’t follow my father into photography; I didn’t become a painter. I love the form in space. That’s always fascinated me. And the physicality and our human relation to a physical object has always fascinated me. I’m interested in exploring that — how a physical object affects us.
One thing I’m exploring more as I get older is letting go of some of the control over the medium and the process that I always thought I had and always wanted, and letting some surprises and unexpected qualities come through in the finished work.
Like, there was a piece that I was working on a couple years ago that suddenly cracked, and I was pissed. So I took it and I just broke it over my knee, and it splintered. It just shattered into two ends of the board. I wasn’t very far into forming it at that point, but then I looked down at this splintered wood, and I suddenly saw this intense beauty in there. And it wasn’t just an aesthetic beauty. It was like an internal hidden beauty that was suddenly revealed. There was kind of a hint of violence in how it was suddenly exposed and shattered, but there was also this purity in there, like an essential quality of the wood.
That became a piece, and it was one of the most improvisational pieces I had done to that point. There was a split second of recognition that there was something in there, that was a start of something. Out of the destruction, comes something new.
In your sculptures, there’s an attempt to put things together, to touch.
As I’ve gotten older, I have a growing interest in interaction. We’re not actors in isolation. There are all these connections, whether it’s community or deep inside ourselves. I’ve become very interested in the dynamics that arise between more than one entity. I’m making works that are almost metaphorical.
Do you think having kids has informed any of that?
Absolutely. It’s this idea that we’re not living in isolation. There’s almost an illusion in one’s twenties or thirties of being self-sufficient. We need other people.
And it’s not just people. Look at the research about trees that use the fungal networks to talk to each other and help each other. It’s the whole world.
Still, there’s nothing more implacable than my daughter who says, I want this now, Daddy. And what I want is more important than what you want.
And you can’t really argue.
So, you were born here. How has this landscape informed your work?
It’s huge. There’s something about the desert. My work is stripped down. Nothing is extraneous. I’m trying to get at the essence of form. And that’s kind of what the desert does, like it or not.
You go out, you come across the gnarled, twisted trunk of a 100-year-old juniper tree. And there’s motion in there. You can see 100 years of growth right before your eyes. Or coming across a dead animal, stripped down to its essence already. Whether it’s bones or feathers, everything gets taken down to a structure really quickly here.
I also love the dry stream beds, where silt has formed and cracked into mud curls, but I never knew what I wanted to do with it. But I’ve started using clay like a clay slip on top of wood. As it dries, it cracks, and the cracks become part of the piece, they’re happening where there’s the most tension in the wood.
And so the cracks are revealing the thing itself. The cracks define something that’s hidden there inside the wood. You sense the cracks are a release of energy. I can be inspired by a bone I find in the ground, but I also like the shape of the hills here. You can see for distances. I need the space here, this amount of sky, the profiles of the mesas, all those things are deep inside of me.