Having Wings

by Hollis Walker

Humanity’s interest in reproducing the animal form likely began as soon as people mastered the ability to paint. Images of life-sized wild pigs discovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi and dated using uranium-series isotope analysis are at least 45,500 years old. The oldest known animal sculpture is a human figure with a lion’s head found in Hohlenstein, Germany, that was carved in mammoth tusk at least 35,000 years ago. 

Indigenous people of the Americas have painted and sculpted animals in ceramics, stone and wood for several thousand years; this imagery speaks to us of what was and is important to them in the animal world. 

We can imagine that our ancestors across the globe were fascinated by animals for many reasons not unlike those that fascinate us today: as food sources; as dangerous beasts deserving of respect; as evidence of fertility and the reproductive process; as entities bearing divine power; and perhaps simply as beautiful and mysterious beings, different from and yet so like humans. 

Sadly, much zoomorphic sculpture today comprises realistic representations of wild beasts or anthropomorphic figures that add little to our understanding of what it means to be animal. We may admire the technical skill of the artist but are not stimulated, intellectually or emotionally, by what we have seen; we are left without questions that might lead us to new discoveries about ourselves and our world.  

Geoffrey Gorman’s animal creations are of a different caliber than these. For eighteen years, Gorman has fashioned creatures wild and domestic from bundles of sticks, baling wire, rusted and painted metal objects, canvas, fragments of bicycle tires and other discarded natural and human-made objects that he collects, alters and combines. He devises his figures much as a novelist dreams up a protagonist, combining the features of various people she has known into a composite character that is at once familiar and yet unique. 

Even if we have not seen a burrowing owl, a gray wolf or a sandhill crane in the wild, we recognize something true about Gorman’s rendering of them, just as we know when a literary figure is believable. This has less to do with realism than with an innate sense that the maker knows his subject as well as he knows his technique. 

Gorman’s technique is no doubt based in his first artform. He studied and worked as a photographer before pursuing a career in the art gallery business. He had trained himself to see as only a photographer does, distinguishing and distilling form and detail, light, dark and color, reality and fantasy. That image-maker’s eye, that knowledge, made him an excellent judge of other artists’ work: he could see what was true. He might never have left that field if not for a collector’s insistent query, “When are you going to go back to making your own art?” That niggling question finally prompted Gorman to make his first figurative piece and include it in an exhibit he was curating at St. John’s College in Santa Fe.

In the years since, he has honed his technique and tools, simplifying his process while mastering it. He uses utility knives and a stationery sander to accomplish most of his work, and salt, vinegar and hydrogen peroxide to rust, age and fix his materials. His studio is a former bedroom in his Santa Fe home, with an exterior door to a small outdoor space where the sander resides, along with piles of sticks and slices of bicycle tires that hang like a peculiar necklace from a fence post. His home doubles as an informal gallery of his artwork, every surface and wall populated with his creatures. 

In this current exhibit, “Having Wings,” Gorman chose new boundaries, limiting his body of work to insects, bats and birds – animals that fly. He allowed himself the freedom to extract details including beaks and wings and explore them as independent forms. He also permitted himself to engage his facility for color and symmetry, particularly in large works depicting wings. The pieces range from very small, life-sized songbirds to a much-larger-than-life praying mantis and an albatross’s enormous wingspan. Coloration ranges from natural wood tones with burn marks to bright primary tones in a gigantic interpretation of cicada wings. 

Gorman spends a lot of time in nature, traveling to exotic locales and hiking, kayaking and nature-watching within an hour’s reach of his Santa Fe home. He collects sticks and other objects on his peregrinations and – perhaps because he is paying acute attention – often sees animals most of us are never lucky enough to glimpse. All feeds his artwork. His familiarity with his subjects comes through as a sort of devotion – not necessarily religious or spiritual, but intuitive. He seems to have an affinity, a kinship with and respect for the animals he portrays. There is whimsy, yes, and realism – in accuracy of form particularly – but also something ineffable that draws us to them, that makes us want to look up “praying mantis” or “Gambel’s quail” because we want to know more. We are left with questions, as we should be when whenever we encounter good art. 

“Having Wings” speaks to us of the metaphor of flight, so essential to our human mythology, from angels to Icarus. We dream of flying and remember those dreams as no others. We yearn for the freedom to escape our earth-bound bodies and soar on the wind, to look down on the world we live in and see it in all its wonder and awfulness, to perhaps understand it better than we can when tethered to it. 

In his gathering and reconfiguring of human and natural detritus into imaginary beings echoed in the real world, Geoffrey Gorman reminds us of those flying dreams and the truth of our own animal natures, of why we take risks and say we do so “on a wing and a prayer.” We want our material world to be populated with such beings as Gorman makes, ever reminding us that we humans are not alone in our sentience. 

–Hollis Walker