Seattle, Washington State

A ramified network of estuaries between snow clad mountain ranges; dark, moss covered rainforests surmounted by mighty volcanoes: America's Pacific Northwest.

Here the native people developed an entirely independent stylistic idiom. Contrary to Africa's pre-cubist sculptures in this part of the world one doesn't see much geometric abstraction. Depictions of animals and men develop almost exclusively from vacillating / oscillating lines and edges, so called Ovoid shapes.

Wood being the omnipresent raw material it naturally leads the sculptures into vertical art forms. For the sculptor the over dimensional columns of basalt - quarried in the Columbia Basin / East Washington - form an exciting analogy. Figurative elements can be arranged on top of each other, whereby a narrative component finds its way into the sculpture. Despite all the differences between their compositions the North West Native's spiritual world shows astonishing analogies with the African conception of the afterlife. Here and there shamanism and animism play a central role, all objects being animated, and a communication with the ancestors comes naturally.

The First Nations' totem poles - by their insouciant coexistence of symbolism and realism, as well as their sudden change of dimensions, and their different degrees of abstraction - constitute a new source of inspiration.

Work from Seattle

Work from Seattle, Totem Pole