O.C. ART / CATHY CURTIS : Sculptor’s Works Spring From Nature

Sculptor Jackie Winsor--whose immaculately plain-spoken, soberly handcrafted work from the past two decades is at the Newport Harbor Art Museum through March 29--was born in 1941 on the island of Newfoundland in Eastern Canada. Growing up in a succession of fishing villages, her favorite companions were rocks, trees and the ocean. The family moved to Boston when she was 11, but she returned to her beloved outdoors during summer vacations.

“I remember one day, when I was 14 or 15, I found this place,” Winsor reminisced recently during a break from supervising the installation of her exhibit. “It was very close to where I was born. I went and plunked myself there. It was an enormously long vista, and I could see in all directions.

“There was a wind blowing through my hair. The wind seemed like a friend because it was full of noise and activity, but it was very neutral and pleasant. It seemed like I had the ‘embracingness’ . . . related to (human contact), but none of the content. People come with problems.”

Winsor’s simple-seeming works--organized primarily in cube, sphere or pyramid shapes, and made of rope or wood or cement--are imbued with unusual qualities of repose and privacy.

“My sense is that abstraction of a certain sort is more about the inner life then the outer life,” she said.

“It’s like you might feel a rock. You have an inner relationship with it. . . . (You say to yourself) ‘It looks clean. I think I’ll sit here.’ And then it’s your spot. You have aligned yourself with the quality of it. It’s nice and quiet and silent there. (You say to yourself) ‘I’ll go there and be nice and quiet and silent.’ (The rock) relates to the intimate part of yourself, not what you necessarily share with everybody else.”

A tall, disarmingly friendly woman wearing ballet slippers, a casual outfit with an artfully draped scarf and drop earrings, Winsor seemed at once fanciful and urbane, hearty and fragile. The easy laugh that punctuates many of her remarks was undercut by repeated wistful allusions to the difficulties inherent in human relationships.

Despite their abstract form, her sculptures have a distinctive anthropomorphic quality. She once told an interviewer that viewers should relate to her sculpture “the way you might relate to a sleeping person, to the potential energy that is manifested in a dormant state.”

Early signs of her fascination for the inert human form were double-exposure photographs she took of her graduate school roommate at Douglass College at Rutgers University. She posed the fair-haired young woman on her back in a field of flowers, with her eyes closed. Winsor thought the image was beautiful. But her roommate was upset--it looked as though she were dead.

During her college years, Winsor experimented with drawing, painting, photography and filmmaking, searching for a way to represent form. Eventually, she gave up painting entirely for drawings of abstracted natural forms. In graduate school she began making small hemispheres, cubes and bone-like objects, which she placed on the floor.

In 1967, in her mid-20s, she moved to Manhattan and began making floor pieces out of lengths of castoff rope dipped in latex or polyester resin. Her first significant piece was “Rope Trick,” a six-foot-tall length of rope with an unraveled base that appears (thanks to an invisible metal rod) to stand on end, like a column. It has a mysteriously strong and witty presence, representing a “cool” triumph over gravity as well as a “warm” focus on a natural material (hemp) with a pleasingly dense and symmetrical texture.

A number of young artists were experimenting with such droopy, unpredictable materials as felt and rubber in those days. Still other artists, known as Minimalists, were devising deliberately basic-looking three-dimensional objects (such as Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes) that were sent out to be fabricated by a factory.

Meanwhile, experimental choreographer Yvonne Rainer was following the lead of the Minimalists by weeding out such dance elements as virtuosity, personality and complex phrasing, and replacing them with simple, repeated “tasks” similar to movements ordinary people do in everyday life.

“I went to see all her performances,” Winsor says. “What interested me was that these abstractions had a physical presence because they were acted out with bodies ,” in contrast to “the hands-off sensibility toward abstraction” typical of Minimalist sculpture.

Winsor’s art involves a long planning stage, but it also requires a great deal of hands-on work, the painstaking process of measuring, joining, wrapping, nailing and so forth that produces a finished piece of pleasing density, weight and presence.

“A very large part of the things I’ve done is trying to set things up as a good match for each other,” she said.

Lengths of wood were nearly obscured by bulky wrappings of hemp thread (“Four Corners,” 1972). Strips of wood nailed into a cube shape created a union between wood and air, in which both substances played an equal role in shaping a form at once spacious and solid (“Fifty-Fifty,” 1975). In “Bound Logs” (1972-73), a pair of 9 1/2-foot-tall logs were stood on end and gnarled, head and foot, with bulbous wrappings of hemp.

Winsor said her goal was to give the skinny rope “exactly the same amount of presence” as the dense and towering logs, and she likens the voluminous knots to the bulging muscles on an athlete.

No matter how well-planned, the making of each piece involved the unpredictable evolution of form, she noted. “You play hopscotch 100 times and it’s never the same. What keeps people involved in solitaire? You are constantly shaping the outcome.”

Beginning in the mid-’70s, Winsor began working in cube formats, using wood or concrete. A few of these pieces are “survivors” that bear--to a greater or lesser degree--the scars of having been subjected to cruel and unusual punishments (being dragged by a car, set on fire, dynamited or pried apart).

A plywood piece was hacked out on top (“Laminated Plywood, 1973), a wood and concrete cube (“Burnt Piece,” not in the show) was deliberately torched, a plywood cube with 50 coats of paint (“Painted Piece,” 1979-80) was dragged along the sidewalk, a wood and concrete cube (“Exploded Piece,” 1980-82) was dynamited. The wood in “Burned and Red Inside-Out Piece” (1985) was charred, broken apart and reassembled inside-out.

Even “Open Cube” (1983)--a plaster cube pried apart, painted red and attached to the wall in a cruciform shape--has a somewhat painful quality. Its irregular edges are testimony to the effort of wedging the piece apart with mallets and 2-by-4s.

Winsor, who calls herself “a very physical person” (she was a gymnastics enthusiast for years) seems to relish talking about the strength involved in making such pieces: “chewing away” the “unchoppable” plywood “like rats on a wall.” But when it comes to possible emotional meanings, she is more circumspect.

“I give a good number of (my sculptures) activities that you experience in your life,” she said carefully. “We’ve all had our emotional lives, we’ve gone through the wringer now and again.”

She said she repeatedly dreamed that her studio was burning down before she ever thought of making “Burnt Piece.” Bizarrely, after she made it, a wall of her studio caught on fire, and a couple of friends of hers died and were cremated.

“That was shocking because basically that was what I was doing with the piece, incinerating it,” she said. A long pause in her otherwise free-flowing conversation was the only suggestion that there is a lot she prefers to leave unsaid. (In fact--although she has denied its impact on her work--her 13-year marriage to artist Keith Sonnier ended at the same time.)

Of “Open Cube,” however, she said the “complex, elaborate” thing that resulted from opening up a simple object shares its basic mood of quiet. “Things that are more complex are usually more problematic in our external life . . . but the sculpture has an appealing visual beauty and on the other hand it isn’t demanding of you.”

Although Winsor had worked with concrete in earlier pieces, she began using it exclusively in 1985, employing color as a physical material in the same way she earlier had used air, fire, explosives or sheer force. The concrete pieces generally contain “windows” or carved out areas that allow the viewer to bend down, peer in and experience the space and saturated vibrancy of color inside.

The glowing hot pink on the scooped out top of the stepped pyramid called “Pink Piece” reminds her of a lipstick shade, “the most obvious sumptuous color.” The intense blue she uses in several works, most memorably in “Blue Sphere,” creates “a radiance,” Winsor says. “You just sink into it.”

“Blue Sphere” was intended to be about bliss, Winsor said with a laugh. “I mean, what else does everyone want in life? Well, you know, love, intimacy. And meanwhile I’d been going at these pieces with blowtorches!”

“Blue Sphere” is a small cement sphere from 1985-86, with powdered deep blue pigment mixed directly into the wet concrete. Six small cube-shaped “windows” and a large cube-shaped opening inside offer a piquant contrast, as if the sphere somehow had swallowed an invisible square.

Winsor said it took her five years to figure out how to make such a piece. In the meantime, she inadvertently damaged another work by treating it too roughly. “I didn’t know how to do intimacy,” she said. “I just knew how to wreck it.” The solution involved a mental return to nature, to locate an appropriate physical approach: “I started keeping in mind a little faun, making friends with some timid wild creature.”

Winsor’s most recent works in the exhibit, from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, are small, square wall pieces that hang at eye-level, like paintings. The inner portions of these works are gently recessed into the wall. In “Inset Wall Piece with Blue Interior” (1988-89), the deep blue color and the play of light and shadow make the recessed part (actually only six inches deep) look as though it continues indefinitely.

Winsor points out that despite their three-dimensional, tangible existence, these pieces create a strong sense of illusion, of a disembodied state.

“The thing they most reminded me of, when I first made them, is closing your eyes,” she said. “What I liked is that you’re coming up to (the piece), and it’s going away from you. . . . It pulls you just a little itsy bit. It’s how much you’re able to deal with. It’s not like going into a big cavern, a place you don’t know. It’s just the movement in that direction, the movement into the shadow. . . .”

“Abstraction, if you’re willing to hang out with it, allows you to be the person you really want to spend time with. . . . It allows you to just be, without throwing you back into your problems, back into your external life.”