Hi Everybody ... I am Mauricio VIllamil, an artist working in multiple mediums ( Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Digital, etc). I thought I would introduce my self by publishing a piece about a sculpture project I am developing currently. I hope you like it, vote me up and we all walk away wealthier than we came . Please see the article and images below. Au revoir ....
Tree-Cycles
By Mauricio Villamil
This series of sculptures are an exploration that weaves strands of memory from the artists early life,
and his natural curiosity and sense of wonder towards inspired by the nature and and it's infinity cycles
of life and rebirth.
The sculptures are fundamentally a work in wood: collected drift wood and fabricated wooden chairs.
Wood in all it's forms, natural and transformed by man's work.
The affinity of the artist with the medium ( wood) comes from his early infancy when he spent many
hours a day in his father's Carpentry workshop. There, as early as 5 years old he built many “abstract
wooden contraptions”, gluing, nailing, cutting, sanding, where the first techniques in his early artistic
journey. But more importantly the sense of wonder seeing how his father would transform whole tree
trunks in to finely crafted pieces of furniture made a deep impression in his young child's mind, an
impression that was going to guide and inspire his career as an artist, Painter and Sculptor.
The atavistic symbolisms inherent to the idea of “Tree” are brought to a new light, by juxtaposing the
different “states” that the tree and wood go through, in their journey through life: from being a living
creature of the earth, to becoming an artistic and utilitarian expression of man's ingenuity as furniture.
The tree must die, so the chair may live, or the tree must die so man's necessity may be fulfilled be it an
utilitarian necessity or of the creative vein.
The chair ( the “ready made” object) has a mysterious way to symbolically and formally represent man
itself, on seen a chair, by habit and a feat of memory we see or remember the form of a man/woman
sitting on it, the form of man/woman is implicit in the form of the chair. The sculptures then are a
symbiotic merger of man and tree, symbolically.
These series of sculptures propose to honor both tree and mans creativity, man's capacity to transform
nature, but also there is the inevitable underlying ringing of perilous balance that man's activity has
upon the life of the planet, many unanswered questions hang in the air, questions about death,
devastation/deforestation, ethical questions about the role of man/woman transformation of nature, and
it's future.
Mauricio Villamil.
More Images:
