Wake Forest Magazine, December 2004 - Past Issues - Wake Forest ...

Newspaper Children, Leeds City Art Gallery, 1991
before, he paid a specialist to teach him
the basics and assist him in making
his first pair of oversized marble shoes.
Soon he began carving even larger and
more elaborately ornamented variations
on the theme, and making them as
singular works, rather than in left-right
pairs. Finn says, “By themselves the
single shoes are more evocative of a
lost mate, or of nearly forgotten memories.”
He chose the title “Ghosts” for this
series of sculptures “because of their
qualities as spiritual reminders, and
because of their cold, stark, white color.”
Although these pieces lend themselves
well to gallery settings, Finn
demonstrated on two relatively recent
occasions that they can also function
effectively as public art. In the fall
of 2003 he displayed nine of them
in the storefront windows of a longestablished
shoe shop in downtown
Winston-Salem. And late last year he
temporarily installed three of them in
an old cemetery in Charleston as part
of a larger, citywide art exhibition
titled “Thresholds.” In the latter setting
their pristine, white-marble surfaces
appeared luminescent among the much
older, weather-darkened tombstones.
On one level Finn’s “Ghosts” affectionately
parody the “nostalgic spirituality”
long associated with the South. “But
they’re also about recognizing and
appreciating that there’s something
very beautiful and sensual about the
relationship with the past that’s so
much a part of the social order in the
region,” he said.
Finn’s showings of the “Ghosts”
in public settings, his resurrection of
his “Masked Figures” for temporary
placement in pedestrian areas in Raleigh
and Winston-Salem in the last three
years, and his more recent, collaborative
endeavors with students—all reflect
the impact that his public-sculpture
course at Wake Forest has had on his
own artistic evolution. This dovetailing
of his roles as artist and teacher has
been a welcome development as far as
he’s concerned, particularly because it
has occurred not by contrivance but in
response to the circumstances at hand.
He points out that working with
others is an invariable requirement of
public projects. While he values his
time spent alone in his studio, he says
that he has always been drawn to
the challenges of working with other
people and making art that seeks to
involve “the non-art crowd.” “Deep
subjectivity is not the only mode for
me. I really want to have other people
relate to my art, rather than have it be
just something out of my head,” Finn
says. “Artists have never been as isolated
from society as they have in the
last hundred years, because art has
become completely independent of
previously existing social structures.
In some ways that’s been very good,
but there’s also a cost involved when
you’ve got radical artists on one side
and the political right slamming back
at them from the other.”
In designing and executing artworks
for the public arena, an artist
need not belong to the community
where a piece will be sited, in Finn’s
view, but he or she must have a genuine
understanding and appreciation
for that community and its needs. Finn
points to his own role in the chess table
project. “I’m not a big chess player,”
he says, “but the concept of building
social relationships by playing chess
is something that I believe in.”
Tom Patterson is an independent writer,
art critic, and curator in Winston-Salem.
He has followed David Finn’s art since
the late 1980s, when he began the series
of visual-art columns that he continues
to write weekly for the Winston-Salem
Journal.
DECEMBER 2004 15