(Shatterline by Henriette Heiny)
Toriizaka Art is currently featuring works by Henriette Heiny and Don MacLane.
Henriette Heiny (Central Oregon) brings a richly layered background to her art, shaped by an illustrative academic career and a doctorate in Art History. After many years in higher education, she has spent the past decade immersed in painting. Earlier explorations in printmaking — lithography, relief and intaglio — inform her current work with acrylics and mixed media.
Henriette’s art is a conversation between intuition and material. She primarily works with acrylics and fluid media, often incorporating unconventional techniques, allowing motion and gravity to direct the flow and layering with mixed textures. Each painting is a search for balance between control and release, form and dissolution.
“I am drawn to the expressive possibilities of color, the dialogue between opacity and transparency, density and flow and the organic forms that emerge in the process. While I do not set out to represent the natural world, my work often evokes landscapes, currents, eruptions or atmospheric shifts — traces of nature felt more than seen.”
Don MacLane (Portland) is an extraordinary kinetic sculptor, coupling his mechanical engineering and welding skills with his keen aesthetic sense of balance and form to create pieces that oscillate and move based on human input.
Don’s interactive kinetic sculptures invite viewers to explore and alter the rhythmic interplay between their moving parts. Exploration starts as the viewer pushes the piece for the first time then continues with successive pushes at different angles and speeds. Changing the length of a pendulum or the curvature of a rocker will alter their natural frequency and change the piece’s pattern of motion.
As with all sculpture, one can view it from different positions. With these pieces the viewer can also touch and set them in motion with a gentle push. Experimentation is also possible — changing the initial conditions (angle and velocity) of the individual elements when they are set in motion or changing the adjustment of a weight’s position will lead to different patterns of motion.
Don has been making objects since childhood. He built toys in his basement woodshop and then, as a teenager, built a small sailboat. In high school, he took an evening class with Roger Bolomey who traveled each week from New York City to teach sculpture.
At Antioch College, Don spent two terms working for a cabinetmaker making custom hardwood furniture. He studied sculpture with John Ritterscamp who had been an assistant to George Rickey. John introduced him to welding. Don then spent three terms as a resident sculptor at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art’s Act Workshop working alongside sculptors John Weidman, David Philips and Mac Beal. After returning to finish up at Antioch, he made his first kinetic pieces.
On graduating, he continued making kinetic work and studied sculpture with Paul Buckner at the University of Oregon. His welding skills steadily improved and led to summer employment first making steel buildings then heavy equipment.
After completing an MFA at Oregon, he returned to Boston to work with his friends from the Act Workshop. He had a small studio shop in New Hampshire and spent summers helping a friend move and reconstruct old timber frame barns.
After four years on the east coast, Don moved back to Oregon and worked as a welder before enrolling in the mechanical engineering program at Portland State University. He alternated between periods of full-time study with periods of full-time welding. He finally received a BSME and went to work developing color printers for Tektronix then Xerox.
As a student then engineer, Don had little time for sculpture but started to play the hammered dulcimer. He began to study the science of musical instruments, finding that their vibrations were remarkably close to the oscillations of his kinetic sculptures. He started making instruments — the first being a hammered dulcimer. He played it almost daily however it was not very portable. When a work assignment sent him to Japan for weeks at a time, he needed an instrument that he could take with him. An idea to make a hammered dulcimer like instrument with clamped cantilever bars like a thumb piano led to the development of his hammered Mbira instruments.
He must have made a dozen different versions of the hammered Mbira before early retirement from Xerox allowed him time to make both sculpture and instruments full time. His many years as a welder, engineering student and engineer provided much of the skills and knowledge he employed in making his instruments and kinetic sculptures. Over time, Don built up a well-equipped studio / machine shop. Retiring from Xerox in 2006, he picked up making kinetic sculpture right where he left off years earlier.