Column: Sculpture

Joseph Wheelwright: Branching Out
by David Raymond

Driving along the road that enters the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, MA, one is startled by the consciousness that appears in Joseph Wheelwright’s tree sculptures installed throughout the landscape. Predator Tree is an inverted yellow birch, its root system at the top suggesting a scraggly head and wild, gesturing arms. A pair of the tree’s large branches do double duty as tree limbs and human legs that seem to step forward, arms swinging, as if just discovering its own existence.

Joseph Wheelwright is a New England artist in several senses. Living and working largely in Boston, with summers spent in Vermont, Wheelwright is an artist with an affection for the emotional scale of New England. Although he has enjoyed a New York exhibition career via the Allan Stone Gallery, his work has also been exhibited in several important New England venues for contemporary art: the DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art, the Fuller Craft Museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and numerous other university and commercial galleries in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, and Rhode Island.

This connection to New England is clearly manifested in the nature of Wheelwright’s sculpture, reminding the viewer of forested New England and the spiritual and philosophical heritage of thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Theirs was an expression of natural truth that informed the sentiment of man’s place within nature. That disposition toward nature also had earlier roots in the medieval myth of the Green Man, a creature of the forest that merged plant life with human life. “It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature,” said Thoreau, unwilling to take sides. Wheelwright’s sculptures, sometimes playful and sometimes somber, engage in the mysterious business of knowing nature, while also being creatures of nature. His tree figures enjoy their knowing state alone, as if forest and field were society enough.

When asked about his long tenure in New England, Wheelwright addresses the age-old comparison of being an artist in Boston versus being an artist in New York: “There are just so many collectors per artist. New York and Boston are the same, except that New York has more of both, along with more pressure.” For Wheelwright, Boston and Vermont offer a psychic distance from the New York art center that encourages his ongoing discovery of the human in the unlikely trees.

Wheelwright is not is a conceptual artist. He speaks of an artistic practice deeply rooted in physical actions and material investigation, with little room for art theory. His trees give up hints of their human kinship in the crotch of a meeting pair of branches, a birch bend that looks like a hip, or bark that strains over a maple knee.

Hiking through the meadows and forest trails at Fruitlands, one is quietly surprised by the tree figures. The sculptures blend in with the surrounding trees as easily as one might forget a phrase that describes them. Even though many are large and stand out, they remain private, singular beings, indifferent to their visitors. In short, they act like figurative sculpture, inhabiting space as though we did not inhabit that space with them. They are the forest: that is their not-so-peculiar marvel.

Wheelwright’s discovery of humanity in trees and stones might be more clearly expressed as a rediscovery, in that the lives he evokes feel ancient and, as Wheelwright would say, “primal.” Although Wheelwright is a carver, much of his work is an act of slight alteration—he searches for trees (and stones) whose forms are suggestive. Wheelwright sees his task as one of emphasis, a drawing out of that figure which was already emerging. In most of the tree pieces at Fruitlands, Wheelwright simply urges the tree towards more human aspects, leaving minimal evidence of his own hand. In a few cases, such as Cherry Figure, Wheelwright is more insistent on a specific emotional, human moment. Shiva is a wonderful billow of roots at the top of a hornbeam tree sculpture that is further topped with a smaller root bunch. The figure is a powerful, mysterious self, frantically poised in its otherness.

David Raymond is a sculptor, painter, poet, and professor of fine arts at Merrimack College, in North Andover, MA, where he is also the director of the McCoy Gallery. He has written for Art New England since 1985.