Every well-behaved gallery-goer knows that the first rule is “Do Not Touch.” Not so at the outdoor sculpture exhibit at the Mill Brook Gallery in Concord. In fact, several sculptures specifically invite visitors to not only touch but also manipulate the work.
The 19th Annual Outdoor Sculpture Exhibit is available for viewing (and touching) through Oct. 23. The exhibit features the works of 24 sculptors from four New England states and one from New York who are known not only in the Northeast, but also nationally and internationally. Admission is free.
It’s just 4 miles from downtown Concord, but gallery owner Pam Tarbell said a lot of people don’t know about it.
“When you travel to other cities in this country or abroad, you go to museums and galleries,” she said. “We have this right here.”
The sculptures are scattered around the sprawling lawn that surrounds Tarbell’s indoor gallery.
Michael Alfano’s “touch me” work stems from his desire for what he calls “democracy in art.” It allows the public to be a part of the art making process, he said.
“They can create their own piece from the tools and materials that I put out there,” he said.
Creating those particular pieces, he said, is a function of making something that’s changeable and durable, although it’s not designed to be manhandled. It should also be fun and interesting.
“Hosey,” a twist of garden hose segments, is accompanied by a label that reads “Bend me some more!” Strands of aluminum wire float out from a wooden frame as if electrified in “Window”; the label invites people to play with the sculpture.
The five segments of Alfano’s “Turning Heads” can be rotated; each segment is part of a human face, and each is a different shade to represent the many colors of a single humanity.
Children are always eager to touch pretty much everything, but adults are a different story. It’s part of the challenge, Alfano said.
“Children will play, but it’s usually the adults that are more hesitant about touching, bending and changing and enjoying art,” he said.
Alfano said he doesn’t regret his invitations to interact with his work.
“There may be some maintenance that’s required over time,” he said. “It’s been very exciting and rewarding to see what people do with it – so many different ideas and thoughts that I could never generate myself.”
Paul Angiolillo created a 6-foot-long pencil made from a single log, which rests on several chinked log segments that Tarbell made to keep it from rolling. Next to this sits a pillow-sized pink eraser.
Angiolillo said he was influenced by the work of Claes Oldenburg, who crafted the huge baseball bat in Chicago and the giant typewriter eraser in Washington, D.C.
“I’ve always liked his idea of taking a common object and making it monumental,” he said. “They’re very accessible to people – you don’t look at it and go, ‘What is that?’ ”
At the same time that it’s a pencil, he said, it’s also basically a log.
“It retains that tree log feel to it, as opposed to taking a log and making a bear out of it,” he said. “It still has a little bend to it.”
He left some bark on and varnished it to represent the ferrule, which is the shiny metal band that attaches an eraser to a pencil.
John Lacz was familiar with metal work even before he became a sculptor. He had an auto body shop in Manchester and made expensive custom “toys” for people – Camaros, Corvettes, hot rods – classics of all kinds, including antique cars.
“I’ve always been into art as far as appreciating it and buying it,” he said, “but I had never thought of being an artist.”
He did build a few wooden pieces for his yard, he said, but then he saw metal sculptures in a gallery in Sedona, Ariz.
“I thought, ‘I could build something like that,’ ” he said. “So I started building metal about 15 years ago.”
About that same time, he became aware of a new paint, made from ground crystals that reflected light and color like a prism. It cost $1,400 a quart.
“I was already doing the artwork and I saw what that paint could do,” he said. “I knew that it would be phenomenal on the metal.”
He was right. The blues and purples of “Free Spirit” and the coppery rose tones of “Mindset” have depth and sparkle that is intensified by the swirling shapes of the sculptures.
While many artists have been formally trained or have some artistic experience, Antoinette Prien Schultze is mostly self-taught. A former opera singer, she needed a new creative outlet after moving to a dairy farm in Maine and having four children.
Schultz said that she always painted and drew, and loved sculpture. She started with clay, and moved on to marble, wood and then granite.
After creating figures for a time (she sculpted “The Mill Girl” in Manchester), her work became more abstract when she started using cast glass about twenty years ago.
“I’ve been doing it ever since,” she said. “I find I can express myself through the color and the translucent quality of glass, the way the light throws the color all over the place. It’s quite beautiful, I think.”
The glass comes in slabs one or two inches thick, and Schultze uses a chisel and hammer to break it instead of grinding it..
“I love what happens when you break it,” she said. “It has a life of its own. It’s a lot like stone or wood in that you can usually only do so much to it.”
In this exhibit, “Sail away on a Teapot” and “Cultured Stone” are each topped with a large piece of cobalt-blue glass.
“The glass is like a flag – it draws attention,” she said.
Hammering away on stone is also therapeutic, she said.
“If I get upset with this world, once I work on my stone it gives me such peace,” she said. “It’s hard work, which I think is very good, and when I finished I’ve created something that I think is beautiful and meaningful.
“It’s a wonderful way for me to live my life,” she said.
Jeffrey Briggs’s “Wolfhound” is more than just a statue of a big dog; its expression is alert and intense, its open mouth ready to speak. Briggs designed the sea, air and land creatures for the carousel at the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston.
Blue and white ceramic birds perch in a tall, twisting, Seuss-like red tree in Andy Moerlein’s “Cavort.”
Next to the duck pond, Liz Fletcher’s “Cry of the Sky” is your favorite piece of pottery all grown up. The 5-foot-tall clay sculpture, which is glazed in blue and tan, is heavily textured with solid waves cascading from the narrow peak to the puddled base. In Bruce Hathaway’s “Union of Opposites,” aluminum arches bend toward each other in a graceful dance.
There’s lots more to see, but be sure to ask Tarbell about the boulder that sits up in a tree. It’s Andy Moerlein’s work, and she’ll tell you how it got there.