“Surely, it’s a testament to our time that a lady hefting a chainsaw now feels like a very natural thing, and in fact somehow does not seem out of harmony with a strangely sensitive side to these works—their attention to the organic and to the properties of natural life and growth. But, whether it’s the cutting that goes against the grain or with the grain, in both cases we feel we’re attuned not to something weak and demure, but to a powerful force—a force to be reckoned with.”
—Henry Adams, Case Western Reserve University, in “Defiance of Gravity”
In Robyn Horn’s thirty years as a wood sculptor, her work has evolved from small, lathe-turned objects to ten-foot-high redwood compositions like her Already Set in Motion #1170, which graces a garden at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In creating these forms that rise from the earth at improbable angles, Horn’s primary tool is the chainsaw, and yet a tenderness for her medium reveals itself in the delicate balance of planes that allows her sculptures to both loom and flow, visually indicating that they are precarious when in fact they are sturdy.
The essays and images in The Sculpture of Robyn Horn sketch the industrious career of this Little Rock, Arkansas-based sculptor, illuminating her attention to geometry, physics, and the philosophy of design, and exploring the context and origin of the various series—Geodes, Millstones, Standing Stones, and Slipping Stones, among others—that characterize her body of work.
Read an excerpt at Arkansas Life.
