Waste Not, Want Not

Steven Siegel creates towers of power out of recycled newspaper, glass and sod at Grounds For Sculpture.

By: Susan Van Dongen
   Climbing up on a huge cube of verdant sod, sculptor Steven Siegel chuckles.
   "It’s a little wet, actually," he says.
   His young assistants from The College of New Jersey and Ewing High School tease him good-naturedly. With the sun beaming down on a weather-perfect day and the crickets pulsing in the late afternoon, there’s a playful mood around the site, tucked in an unfinished corner of Grounds For Sculpture.
   But there is, in fact, hard work and serious creative business afoot.
   The as-yet untitled work is the first of three Mr. Siegel is creating on-site at the sculpture garden.
   Based in upstate New York, Mr. Siegel is the latest artist-in-residence at Grounds For Sculpture. Known for his large outdoor works placed in surprising and sometimes hidden locations, he’s making three pieces using indigenous post-consumer materials — recyclables, in other words. The works will be officially unveiled to the public Oct. 8. Mr. Siegel will give a talk about his work and philosophy Oct. 6. He also has a collection of smaller pieces titled Steven Siegel: Selections from Wonderful Life on the mezzanine of the Domestic Arts Building at Grounds For Sculpture, on view through April 29.
   "This is something new for me, and Grounds For Sculpture," Mr. Siegel says. "As far as I know, only one other person has worked on-site. I’m not interested in manicured settings. That’s not appropriate for this kind of rough work. The rawer the site, the better. To me, the more interesting the topography of the site is, the better."
   That’s why the weedy hills in the newer part of the sculpture park appealed to Mr. Siegel. He envisions the grass and weeds growing up around his suite of pieces, the only path up to the works being from the foot traffic that might trample down the grass. "Only I would be interested in a place like this," he says with a smile.
   With help from art students at EHS, sculpture students from TCNJ and a handful of teenage residents from Anchor House, he’s just about finished with the grass cube. Created with sedum, a ground cover, the sculpture will continue to grow and change organically throughout the seasons.
   There’s also a neighboring cube assembled from glass tiles donated by the Congoleum Corporation. The third sculpture, mirroring Mr. Siegel’s earlier works, is made with more than 10 cubic yards of recycled newspapers, given to the project by the Trentonian.
   "They’re like three packages of materials," Mr. Siegel says. "The grid surrounding them will be like a net, so that each one looks like a bale of material — grass, glass and paper. And they kind of look like they were just plopped down here. That’s part of the reason I’ve played with the hills a little bit."
   Throughout his lengthy career, Mr. Siegel has become known for making accumulations from a single material, elaborately layered and stacked into monolithic forms. They might resemble boulders, vessels, geological formations or immense artifacts.
   The process of putting the sculptures together is painstaking and requires the artist and his helpers to go through long periods of repetitive, yet thoughtful, activity. As residents in a Zen monastery find the motions of sweeping a floor meditative, Mr. Siegel hopes that the physical element of slowly fabricating his works might put himself and the other participants into a contemplative "zone."
   "You do get somewhat in a zone," Mr. Siegel says. "The paper ones are more fun because it doesn’t require that much skill, anyone can be trained to do it. Once you get into the rhythm, you just stop thinking about it. So, ideally, there is this Zen repetitive thing going on.
   "However, (the glass tile work) is much more complicated than it looks and it has to do with understanding the materials, the quantity that we have and distributing (the tiles) so that they end up where we want them," he continues. "I have literally placed almost all of this material myself. If you make a mistake, glass is unforgiving — not like paper. So this one has been very tense, this one has not been meditative at all. It’s becoming more of an improvisation."
   The sculptor began a dialogue with Grounds For Sculpture about a year ago. He pointed out that he worked with all kinds of industrial materials and the sculpture park was located in the middle of an industrial environment.
   "So I said, ‘See what you can find and I’ll work with it,’" Mr. Siegel says. "They came up with this glass — 28,000 pounds of it."
   "A cube is not something I would usually do, in fact I don’t have that much interest in it as a form," he continues. "But because I had to design the first piece from all this glass, a cube made the most sense. I decided to do a suite of pieces in three different materials."
   Observing the layers upon layers within Mr. Siegel’s works, and knowing his past curiosity about geology, you might compare them to the striations in an outcropping of rock. However, he says he has become interested more recently in evolutionary biology and sees the new work as a hybrid between his old and new influences.
   "In geology, there is nothing similar to a container or a bale — that has to do more with biology," Mr. Siegel says. "Both speak to the large accumulations of very small particles. Both are about the organization of materials and the generation of form. But when you get into biology, you’re dealing with an order or complexity that is infinitely greater than anything in the landscape.
   "When you think about stratification, that’s sedimentary geology, which is basically pretty simple," he continues. "But once you get into biology it gets very complicated. So yes, these large pieces are geologically informed but other work I’ve been doing, especially in the last five or six years, has gone in the other directions."
   He’s referring to the works featured in the Domestic Arts Building in the exhibition Steven Siegel: Selections from Wonderful Life. These are just some of the mixed-media pieces in Mr. Siegel’s series inspired by his interest in evolutionary biology. The series is dedicated to the life and work of Stephen Jay Gould but is also loosely inspired by other thinkers, from Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins.
   "Landscape is built in very small accumulations, with layers that are placed one grain at a time, like very small steps," he says. "And in genetics, it’s the same thing. It takes countless generations of a species for evolution to occur, a minor mutation within this huge spectrum of genetic materials. Things happen very slowly. It’s the same kind of experience with a hike or a long walk. It’s not just having a destination and getting to it. Every step is important."
Steven Siegel will discuss his new work at Grounds For Sculpture, 18 Fairgrounds Road, Hamilton, Oct. 6. Reception 6:30 p.m., lecture and presentation 7 p.m. Registration is requested. His suite of outdoor works officially opens Oct. 8, 10 a.m. Steven Siegel: Selections from Wonderful Life, mixed-media works by Mr. Siegel, is on view on the mezzanine of the Domestic Arts Building through April 29, 2007. Grounds For Sculpture is open in Oct., Tues-Sun. 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Nov.-March, Tues.-Sun. 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission costs $5 Tues.-Thurs., $8 Fri., $12 Sun. For information, call (609) 586-0616. On the Web: www.groundsforsculpture.org. Steven Siegel on the Web: www.stevensiegel.net