Patrick Dougherty gives new life to old sticks with his whimsical and inviting sculptures.
READ THE SCRIPT:
[Patrick] I just wanted to be a sculptor, and so I went back to school and so that put me on a good path to make a living and making a life's work out of it.
I always think that people love to have to look out and see out the path that's going off into the woods, and so there's a sense of that when you see this work, there are a lot of doors and windows and you imagine, ah, maybe I could go in. Maybe I could, and when people other people are in there, they're in enlivening, and so if you see somebody in there you think, Oh, I could go in there too.
Starting point for this one, we looked at a lot of secret insect trails that are in the garden. If you look on the back of leaves, you look at the ground insects make like little pathways. So we took that boring pattern and we laid it out on the ground. We scaled it up, intertwining of the sticks, make a very strong wall that you can use.
You can feature all kinds of architectural, strange architectural details of having walls and flying buttresses and leaning over and leaning one way and then another.
So I get a big stick like this, and I know it's too long for me to pull it through. So I'll make two pieces out of it. I can use that top in a different way. Sometimes I'll bend the thing just slightly because of I'm trying to make it a little bit more flexible then I'll drive it down in here. I want it to cross these two pieces because axing is also a way that make lines look more interesting.
So we I've learned to use sticks and lots of different ways. It's a slow process of building up the quality of wine, just work at it for hours. Pretty soon you have something that people really aren't enticed by. They really wanna be able to come over and explore this.
Usually you get about two good years to get one great year and one pretty good year, and you try to take the piece down while it's still works good because this is a public exhibition and you want it to be serviceable right to its very end. So close to the two year mark the garden must start evaluating it and say, well, maybe he could stay up another month maybe another month and set a certain point. Just like some of the flower beds that fade here and they'll say, Hey, let's plan something new.