Email this page
Print this page
del.icio.us
digg
Jesse Salisbury grew up on the Pigeon Hill Road in Steuben, but he spent his high school years in Japan, where he fell in love with large scale granite sculpture. Today he’s right back in the same house he grew up in, now with a wife (also a sculptor), and a baby (not a sculptor—yet).
It’s a circle of movement over a relatively short life—Salisbury is 35—that has found him fishing in Alaska, running forklifts in Japan, apprenticing to potters, ceramicists, and sculptors all over the globe, and translating Japanese for international artists—all the while with his “head in the rocks.”
From the time he was a child, everyone has had to acknowledge his 3-dimensional brain. Over the years, he’s carved wood, marble, pretty much whatever presented itself that was carvable, until he returned home to settle with the mother lode. Salisbury lives within 30 miles of a number of dimension-size granite quarries, and has a basalt rock quarry literally in his backyard. Before the end of the year, his new studio, with 16-foot doors and 20-foot walls, will be functional, and for the first time he will have the option of working inside, although he knows that working year-round outside will be hard to shake. He has come to love the bite of winter on his face, the challenge of sure movement when dressed for Maine’s harshest elements.
Salisbury’s work requires excavators, cranes, compressors, fish nets (to lift the stone), a fearlessness in the face of rock that often weighs more than 20 tons, and an eye that can see the delicate, personal rhythms embedded in such massive material. His pieces can range from a rare 60 pounds to a couple of tons.
With more than 25 exhibits under his belt, Salisbury has also participated in international sculpture symposia in Japan, New Zealand, and the United States, including the ambitious 2007 Schoodic International Sculpture Symposium, which he organized. A 1995 graduate of Colby College, he sees his symposia experiences, in which sculptors from all over the world come together to create large scale work using different techniques, to live together for weeks, and to converse in “the language of the material,” as his graduate school.
Although his work is in both private and public collections, Salisbury’s roots remain in the world of public art, and the expanded conversation it creates in a community.
Both he and his wife, Kazumi Hoshino, currently have work in an exhibition at Nasunogahara in Tochigi, Japan.
By the time you went to college, you had a strong interest in sculpture. Why didn’t you major in art?
I was really fascinated by Japanese art and Chinese art. Most schools where you can study sculpture have a European model. You go to Italy to study, not Japan or China. Majoring in East Asian studies and minoring in Chinese and art was sort of my way of building the program I wanted.
How did Japan influence your career as a sculptor?
In many ways. I think it’s significant that in Japan they don’t have a strong private art market for sculpture. It was all about public art. When I was studying there, in the ’90s, they were very much into these big sculpture competitions—20-ton sculptures that would end up in some sculpture park. They were making very ambitious work.
Pretty different from Maine?
Absolutely. When I came back, I wanted to make these big sculptures, and here everybody was making stuff for galleries.
Did you ever think you would settle here in Steuben, literally in the house where you grew up?
Yes, I did. It just took me a while. After I finished college, I worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska. It was a way to make money and travel. I could live this nomadic life, traveling and always studying. In New York City and Santa Fe, I just picked up the Yellow Pages and called artists. I worked as an assistant for whoever needed help with something that interested me. And I kept up my ties in Japan and would be there three months a year. I got a job working for a stone sculptor on the west side of the main island. He was making large granite and basalt sculptures—just what I’d really been looking for.
Your first show was in Steuben.
Yes, it was. 1999. I’d moved into our old house and bought a compressor. I had six or seven pieces at Peter Weil’s gallery [Weil was his first carving teacher] and I sold almost all of them. I took most of the money—well, a lot had to go to paying all my back bills, but with what was leftover, I bought a 1959 20-ton cable crane.
You need a lot of big equipment and power stuff to make these sculptures.
Yes and no. I’d seen a lot of high-tech tools in Japan and had access to them and then owned them myself. I was able to manipulate the material relatively quickly, but that’s not necessarily technique. That’s knowing what the best tools are. Actually, I do all my splitting with a very old technique using wedges and chisels I make myself.
How do you choose a piece of rock?
When in doubt, I choose a lot of them. Having this much stone available to me has let me experiment. It really became what the work is about. It’s right on the edge of what’s possible with splitting, and sometimes you go the other side of the edge. I can take the risk. I can push the envelope.
So you learn a lot by trail and error.
Error. To split good, you have to break more stones than most people split. You always learn more from the ones that don’t split right. Some of my early mistakes are standard moves now.
We see stone as strong, solid stuff, but you must have to see its weaknesses.
And you know all its weaknesses, and so a lot of the work feels like it’s looking at how rock changes over time and manipulating that. This was a single 20-ton boulder [he’s showing an image on his laptop]. I split it more than 500 times to make 52 pieces. Just shaped by splitting. Each section is moved apart and assembled and you can walk through it in four directions. This outside shape is the original shape of the boulder, the skin.
What’s skin?
It’s the surface—what’s been underground and rolled around, or it could be a natural seam that water could travel through and eat away at material, change the color.
Your work is so large. It must be amazing to see it take its place as part of the landscape.
It definitely has that effect. It’s like the awe you feel when you find a window rock carved by nature or a big rock balanced on another.
If you could do anything, what might it be?
I’d like to do larger scale projects. Something that people could really move in and out of and incorporate into the landscape. The only problem is that takes a serious budget.
You’d need a benefactor, somebody who says, “OK, here it is, Jesse, go for it.”
But when that happens, I’m going to be ready.
It’s a circle of movement over a relatively short life—Salisbury is 35—that has found him fishing in Alaska, running forklifts in Japan, apprenticing to potters, ceramicists, and sculptors all over the globe, and translating Japanese for international artists—all the while with his “head in the rocks.”
From the time he was a child, everyone has had to acknowledge his 3-dimensional brain. Over the years, he’s carved wood, marble, pretty much whatever presented itself that was carvable, until he returned home to settle with the mother lode. Salisbury lives within 30 miles of a number of dimension-size granite quarries, and has a basalt rock quarry literally in his backyard. Before the end of the year, his new studio, with 16-foot doors and 20-foot walls, will be functional, and for the first time he will have the option of working inside, although he knows that working year-round outside will be hard to shake. He has come to love the bite of winter on his face, the challenge of sure movement when dressed for Maine’s harshest elements.
Advertisement
Salisbury’s work requires excavators, cranes, compressors, fish nets (to lift the stone), a fearlessness in the face of rock that often weighs more than 20 tons, and an eye that can see the delicate, personal rhythms embedded in such massive material. His pieces can range from a rare 60 pounds to a couple of tons.
With more than 25 exhibits under his belt, Salisbury has also participated in international sculpture symposia in Japan, New Zealand, and the United States, including the ambitious 2007 Schoodic International Sculpture Symposium, which he organized. A 1995 graduate of Colby College, he sees his symposia experiences, in which sculptors from all over the world come together to create large scale work using different techniques, to live together for weeks, and to converse in “the language of the material,” as his graduate school.
Although his work is in both private and public collections, Salisbury’s roots remain in the world of public art, and the expanded conversation it creates in a community.
Both he and his wife, Kazumi Hoshino, currently have work in an exhibition at Nasunogahara in Tochigi, Japan.
By the time you went to college, you had a strong interest in sculpture. Why didn’t you major in art?
I was really fascinated by Japanese art and Chinese art. Most schools where you can study sculpture have a European model. You go to Italy to study, not Japan or China. Majoring in East Asian studies and minoring in Chinese and art was sort of my way of building the program I wanted.
How did Japan influence your career as a sculptor?
In many ways. I think it’s significant that in Japan they don’t have a strong private art market for sculpture. It was all about public art. When I was studying there, in the ’90s, they were very much into these big sculpture competitions—20-ton sculptures that would end up in some sculpture park. They were making very ambitious work.
Pretty different from Maine?
Absolutely. When I came back, I wanted to make these big sculptures, and here everybody was making stuff for galleries.
Did you ever think you would settle here in Steuben, literally in the house where you grew up?
Yes, I did. It just took me a while. After I finished college, I worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska. It was a way to make money and travel. I could live this nomadic life, traveling and always studying. In New York City and Santa Fe, I just picked up the Yellow Pages and called artists. I worked as an assistant for whoever needed help with something that interested me. And I kept up my ties in Japan and would be there three months a year. I got a job working for a stone sculptor on the west side of the main island. He was making large granite and basalt sculptures—just what I’d really been looking for.
Your first show was in Steuben.
Yes, it was. 1999. I’d moved into our old house and bought a compressor. I had six or seven pieces at Peter Weil’s gallery [Weil was his first carving teacher] and I sold almost all of them. I took most of the money—well, a lot had to go to paying all my back bills, but with what was leftover, I bought a 1959 20-ton cable crane.
You need a lot of big equipment and power stuff to make these sculptures.
Yes and no. I’d seen a lot of high-tech tools in Japan and had access to them and then owned them myself. I was able to manipulate the material relatively quickly, but that’s not necessarily technique. That’s knowing what the best tools are. Actually, I do all my splitting with a very old technique using wedges and chisels I make myself.
How do you choose a piece of rock?
When in doubt, I choose a lot of them. Having this much stone available to me has let me experiment. It really became what the work is about. It’s right on the edge of what’s possible with splitting, and sometimes you go the other side of the edge. I can take the risk. I can push the envelope.
So you learn a lot by trail and error.
Error. To split good, you have to break more stones than most people split. You always learn more from the ones that don’t split right. Some of my early mistakes are standard moves now.
We see stone as strong, solid stuff, but you must have to see its weaknesses.
And you know all its weaknesses, and so a lot of the work feels like it’s looking at how rock changes over time and manipulating that. This was a single 20-ton boulder [he’s showing an image on his laptop]. I split it more than 500 times to make 52 pieces. Just shaped by splitting. Each section is moved apart and assembled and you can walk through it in four directions. This outside shape is the original shape of the boulder, the skin.
What’s skin?
It’s the surface—what’s been underground and rolled around, or it could be a natural seam that water could travel through and eat away at material, change the color.
Your work is so large. It must be amazing to see it take its place as part of the landscape.
It definitely has that effect. It’s like the awe you feel when you find a window rock carved by nature or a big rock balanced on another.
If you could do anything, what might it be?
I’d like to do larger scale projects. Something that people could really move in and out of and incorporate into the landscape. The only problem is that takes a serious budget.
You’d need a benefactor, somebody who says, “OK, here it is, Jesse, go for it.”
But when that happens, I’m going to be ready.
