Construction & Transformation

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A mixed medium sculpture resembling a spherical face, with toy trucks and cars protruding out of its head. It has hollow eyes and purple ears, propped on pencils balanced on a myraid of small toy cars — Dewey Blocksma, *Amarillo* mixed-media sculpture, 22 in. x 28 in. x 16 in.

Artist Statement

I have increasingly been fascinated by the wiring of our visual pathways, how from puzzling composites, gray matter assembles images using both sides of the brain. I depict this action literally with bobber and telephone-wire pathways in the piece titled “Punk Rock Puzzle Head.” “Flotation” and “Flying Fish” are flashbacks to an ocean adventure on a three-masted school ship sailing from Bergen, Norway, to Senegal and back via the Azores. Beauty for me has little to do with perfection. I prefer the fragile, the fragmentary, and the unfinished. I choose objects as if they were willing organ donors—wooden spoons agreeing to become ears and hands, pick-up sticks ready to become porcupine quills, wooden shoes able to laugh or cry—objects that add their life and history to my constructions. Sculpture for me is a form thinking. Good art can turn a wishbone into a backbone. It’s all about transformation.

Dewey Blocksma

was born near the half-buried Cadillac sculptures outside Amarillo, Texas, in 1943, and home-taught overseas, reentering American culture at age eleven as an observer and maker of toys. Lured again by travel, he worked in a small hospital in Tanzania on the banks of Lake Victoria and on a three-masted ship and went on to a career in emergency medicine. Blocksma, now a full-time artist, has had work in several Chicago and New York exhibitions, some of which focused on outsider or self-taught art, and in the book American Folk Art of the Twentieth Century (Rizzoli, 1983). He lives with his partner Sandra Hulst in the woods near Beulah, Michigan, hoping the making of sculpture will coax some of life’s mysteries out of the shadows.

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