Dale Roberts creates sculptural works that
span a great range of scale and expression, fabricating his pieces
from a variety of unlikely materials, including wood, hemp, rope
and twine. Utilizing rope- and net-making skills learned during
an early life spent in the Maritimes, Roberts uses nautical objects
and textiles to create delicate, complex forms resembling aquatic
plants, corals, shells, and sea creatures. These forms are knotted,
woven, crocheted, strung or twined from multiple fibres and textiles,
and often incorporate scavenged cloth and found objects. Roberts'
repertoire of found elements includes delicately coloured fabric,
glittering beads, glass orbs, antique lace, cascades of fringe,
and gleaming metal. Contrasts of surfaces and textures, combined
with exquisitely balanced complements of colours and shapes,
create grand, symphonic patterns that resonate throughout the
show.
Roberts' formal triumph is all the more
impressive given the scope, intricacy and coherence of this most
recent body of works. The show consists of over a hundred individual,
small pieces. Each piece is utterly unique in character, even
while each expresses a lively responsiveness to every other work
in Roberts' aquatic corpus. Like vital members of an interactive,
organic whole, the discrete works present as symbiotic communicants
in a formal, aesthetic ecology, the tightly integrated structures
of which cohere to create a deceptive illusion of ethereal fragility.
In actual fact, these works are virtually
indestructible. Their tightly woven microstructures endow a cellular
intactness to the painstakingly built volumes, spaces and contours
of these tiny, epic expressions. 'Seasoning' in the sea is a
penultimate stage of creation for many of Roberts pieces; brine,
wind and surf serve as the active agents, lending scent, patina,
weathered patterns, and 'antique' colourations to the works.
For the period of time Roberts' sculptures inhabit natural settings-exposed
to the flukes of wind, weather, and tides-they must be considered
as environmental art, occupying and responding to the elements.
They then present collectively as 'Fine Art' in the classical
sense, manifesting in sheer numbers and consistency as a gallery
exhibition with multiple sensory appeal. The works can not only
be seen, but smelled, minutely examined, and even touched. Roberts
encourages the notion of taking the wall sculptures off the wall
and handling them for maximum sensual appreciation. My first
response to this news was the urge to bury my nose in frothy
cascades of fabric and rub some of the softer, more exuberant
pieces on my face.
An intimate response to the works is quite
natural, as one endearing feature of the small wall sculptures,
collectively called Distorts, is that they resemble nothing so
much as recovered, vaguely familiar parts of the organic body.
These could be tender, vulnerable 'parts' of the emotional body,
or aspirational impulses of the spiritual body. They can even
be related to as mysterious, little understood organs of the
physical body, whose purposes and functions are vestigial but
deemed somehow essential to the whole-like tonsils, appendixes,
or nipples on men. They are human seeming even while resembling
hypothetical evolutionary, possibly alien, ancestors. They possess
humanity and strangeness in equal measure.
Besides possessing their individual and
collective primordial mystery, the works appear to be organic
in that they look as if they grew in nature and not simply from
the hands of Dale Roberts. Some resemble the more exotic fungal
growths that adorn tree trunks in the North Western rain forest,
their ruffles and fringes the gills of delicately hued mushrooms.
Some blossom into their shapes and contours like tiny arboreal
entities. Seen in terms of the vegetative realm of their materials'
primary origin-the cultures and industries of the sea-they evoke
intensely expressive seaweed growths, or some of the more flamboyant
underwater plants that furnish the aquarium environments of tropical
fish. Placing them into the aquatic realm of animal life might
interpret the forms as the mineralized accretions of brilliantly
coloured coral colonies, or the coiling extravagances of mollusk
shells and sea anemones. Undersea geology might provide a visual
reference more along the lines of deep-sea mineralizations or
lava flows-or the decorative flanges of unfathomable thermal
vents. The actual craft of human exploitation of the sea lies
behind those works that suggest fishing nets, crab baskets, and
lobster pots-each with their precious, beguiling cargoes.
Some pieces are distinctly erotic, suggesting
intimate anatomies or delicate, vaguely recognized genital organs
and erogenous zones. Curling, coiling, wrapping, folding-the
sculptures are embodied inscriptions of strength and vulnerability,
tactile sensitivity and desire. They are reminiscent of fingers
and lips, genitalia and fingertips, the sensitive tissues of
bodily responsiveness and access. They seem valorously trusting
in their labial display, putting it out there in their celebratory
magnitude. One focuses on the individual pieces one by one, after
first being dazzled by their legion numbers upon the wall, a
fiesta of carnival colours and jaunty fetishes, like those that
festoon the headpieces of Mardi Gras celebrants or Circe de Soleil
trapeze artists.
A few pieces describe the timeless classical
symbolism of mysticism: mandorlas, lemniscates, spirals and parabolas.
Overall, the distinct 'personalities' of the one hundred Distorts
are found to be likeable, all convey a confident positivity and
humour-a certain jaunty cachet. Each packs a potent, if tiny,
wallop in terms of 'stage presence.' Their collective charisma
can only be described as quixotic, composed of a hundred, small,
heroic gestures-salutes to the infinite variety of form attainable
from modest, cellular, elemental foundations.
As with all truly coherent shows, this one is unified
by its own myth or narratology. In this story, the Distorts both
originate in and lead to the one large sculpture in the exhibit.
This is a figurative work that started out in life in the crude
likeness of a classical Neptune. In his primitiveness he more
resembled Proteus, captured at the moment of rising from the
primordial depths, and questing for his raison d'être.
But as time went by, under Roberts' ministrations to essence
and formal expression, classical Neptune began to 'morph' into
another kind of mythical creature altogether. He became what
Roberts calls the Androgyne, invoking the hermaphroditic nature
of the ancestral divinities who inhabit the most ancient creation
myths. His woven, felted, knitted and composite form evolved
(or devolved, depending on your perspective) into an entity both
more ambiguous and more potent. According to the Distorts' ethos,
the Androgyne is the progenitor of the Distorts, in all their
legion diversities of expression. He/She is like the protean
origin of infinite possibility and unlimited expression.
Hermaphroditic Neptune is the mother and
father of all form, in all of its surprising, lyrical variety.
The Androgyne is self-quickening, autonomously procreative-capable
of parthenogenesis on a vast scale. He/She is the egg of forms,
the divine parent of all life, all being-an ancestor spirit whose
nature is both cosmic and aquatic, combined of Mother Sea and
Father Sky. As such, he has his own birth canal-an orifice or
opening at the heart.
The ruffled labia of this 'sacred wound'
are like the petals of an exquisite flower, or like the 'event
horizon' of an imploding star. His form, increasingly, folds
around this heroic, if vulnerable, opening. Both portal and passage,
it brings negative space into what is solid. Autonomous form
becomes a corridor for interpenetration and participatory responsiveness
by virtue of its valiant, prolific heart. Complete within itself,
the Androgyne creates abundantly directly from a heart that doesn't
merely bleed, but births. Neptune's 'sacred heart' is both portal
and womb-both negative space and becoming. Appropriately for
a divinity of the sea, curling like a shell around its vulnerable,
awesome power, the Androgyne is, himself, a chamber of dreams.
