From the category archives:

Peter Adams

A cautionary tale

January 12, 2010

Inertia results, not so much in the delay of the future, but in the destruction of its potential.

For a very long time I was aware that the Shakespeare Bench was slowly degrading and that if I wanted its carved-into-the-wood message of “tongues in trees, sermons in stones, books in brooks” to have a longer [...]

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A peek into four months of an artist’s life

November 23, 2009

Just over a year ago I was working long hours seven days a week on the sculpture ‘King Neptune’s Beads’; a process that was to consume four months as there was a time deadline to meet. The sculpture had to arrive in Denmark in time for the opening of an outdoor exhibition of 60 international [...]

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The model

March 27, 2008

A Gary Snyder zen poem reads:
“In the shaping of the axe the model is close at hand.”
As a sculptor who uses axes, chisels, gouges, rasps and other tools-of-removal, I am fond of this poem, not only because of its multiple koan meanings, but because of literal wisdom in the notion that if one wants to [...]

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An artist’s life – 4

February 15, 2008

Last night I slept 12 hours. Bone tired, I was. Not to say that I wasn’t content in my tiredness, because I was. You see, the past two weeks have been spent preparing for and executing a site specific sculpture at the Friendly Beaches Eco-Lodge on the east coast of Tasmania. The only requirements [...]

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An artist’s life – 3

January 30, 2008

Lifer
Hunched over hard white bread
and plastic soup bowl filled with gruel,
he looked like a stork, a silly angel,
all neck and bony shoulder-wings
and awkward beak.
His head lifted, then fell
in a slow deliberate dance,
three, four times, dough-skinned
in a gray room sickened by yellow light.
He kept his eyes shut tight.
Outside the prison dining hall,
a turnkey slammed and locked
the [...]

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An artist’s life

January 15, 2008

All too often people think that being an artist is a care free, no stress, easy going way to make a living that just touches on being a serious, worthy occupation. Our office (our studios) can be visited, it seems, at any time of the week because we’re not really doing anything that requires a [...]

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Continuing our journeys

January 2, 2008

January 2, 2008. Here we all are at the start of another year. Each one of us on our individual journeys doing the best we can dealing with the winds and currents that buffet our boats as they course their way through life. May we all have a safe passage to whatever awaits us.

To represent [...]

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Observing change

November 23, 2007

The photos below are four years apart with the most recent taken just yesterday evening.
The ‘Drop Stone’s’ ageing over the intervening years is clearly evident with the freshly oiled, brightly vibrant, sandy yellow of newly finished huon pine contrasting sharply with the grey, weathered look of today’s bench.

Change is seen elsewhere.
Looking [...]

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A shell’s birth

October 3, 2007

In imagination is the preservation of wilderness. By this I mean one of two things. The first is that even while living deep within the confines of a city a person can close their eyes and imagine—quite vividly—the smells, visual details and tactile qualities of the green earth that they have in the past experienced. [...]

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Just carve

May 24, 2007

Sally paints, I carve. But of what? And, why?
Hard questions to answer even though we both constantly pursue answers.
Speaking for myself, I suppose that, if anything, I am trying to make visible the numinous quality of nature; at least give hints of it. But it is so complex that I sometimes tire of asking the [...]

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