Artist Matthew Weir has a deep sense of nostalgia with an eye toward the far future. He has seen a lot in his thirty years – more or less the same things the rest of us have, of course, but the changing landscape seems to have affected him more than most. The woods behind his childhood home near the Bellarmine campus have been swallowed up by development and, along with them, the clay and wood constructions he created in the mud there as a boy. “I enjoy the abstract form,” he says, “but as far as how I feel about the state of the world and the generations to follow us, I don’t feel there’s much room for abstraction anymore.”
At work, Weir is a traditionalist. Using a hammer and chisel, he works frequently with Indiana limestone. He’s also setting up a blacksmithing forge in his Germantown studio – despite having accidentally set himself on fire from time to time working with hot metal. His other mediums have included wood, fiberglass resin, plaster, rubber, even wax. The multi-dimensional artist says, “I grew up drawing and painting as well, and I guess I don’t find the time to do it much anymore.”
Weir’s alma mater, St. Xavier High School, is home to his bronze rendering of its mascot, a tiger. The 11-foot-long, 1,000-pound cat represents a departure from his earlier abstract work. To accurately capture such a figure with meaning to so many, Weir – who, in 2004 received his B.F.A. in Sculpture from the University of Louisville – studied countless photos of tigers, visited the zoo and even watched YouTube videos of tiger attacks. He sketched tigers, made miniature models, then, after having a full size Styrofoam model of the tiger made, cast the statue himself using a complex traditional method known as the “lost wax” process, adding details along the way.
Weir always carries a sketchbook, in which he regularly draws and composes ideas. “My inspiration now is the play in a natural landscape and how that landscape isn’t there anymore,” he says. “In my own little personal way, it can be easily compared to the rest of the world. The play landscape we evolved with as human beings is completely missing from the planet now. It’s very exciting in a futuristic, car-crash sort of way.”
It’s not all bad, however: “The term ‘sculpture’ used to refer only to stone carving, before bronze casting and things like that,” Weir says. “All of the lines of art are blurred now, and they really blur to the ends of the lines of culture and media. And it’ll all blend together and it’ll be hard to determine one thing from another, and that’s okay too. It’s the trajectory of things.”
Weir’s sculptures are all over Louisville, on permanent display in such places as Thomas Jefferson Unitarian Church, Bernheim Forest and Jewish Hospital South. Recently, Weir was awarded the Norman Kohlhepp Merit Award for his creation, “Spear Bearer,” on display through March 7 at the Louisville Visual Art Association’s 2010 Water Tower Regional Exhibition.
Many of Matthew Weir’s works, along with his detailed description of the lost wax process, can be seen at his Web site, www.mweir.com.
Eve Bohakel Lee can be reached at leecopywriting@gmail.com, or www.leecopywriting.com.
