October 5, 2006
Sculptor’s work won’t endure, but he hopes it starts conversations
Michael Magrath expects the sculpture he installed downtown in September to dissolve by Christmas. That’s because the sculpture, created in honor of September 11, is made out of salt.
It’s not exactly what one usually expects of a memorial. “The aim of the sculptor is usually for the work to be eternal,” says Magrath, a guest instructor of sculpture in the UW School of Art. “But that’s a fool’s errand. You see the sculptures from ancient Greece and Rome and how they’ve been worn away. Everything passes away in time.”
Magrath’s sculpture, called Lot’s Tribe, won’t endure, but it’s intended to be a conversation starter while it lasts. The artist created three figures — which now stand in Pioneer Square’s Occidental Park — based on news photographs taken in Iraq during the war. There’s a young boy in a blindfold, squatting with his hands tied behind his back; a father carrying the body of his dead son; and a seated man with a grief-stricken look on his face.
“I was looking at these images on the Web, and they were very moving,” Magrath says. “I thought, ‘Why am I not seeing these anywhere else?’ Then I realized I was seeing them elsewhere, but because I was seeing them in the midst of others, the effect was washed away. By the time you’ve seen photo number 15, you’ve forgotten what the first one was like.”
So Magrath tried to think of how he could counteract that numbing effect, and the first thing that struck him was the need to make the images three-dimensional, and therefore harder to ignore. But still, he realized, there would be a dilution over time. Then the Biblical image of Lot’s wife came to him. Against God’s orders, she turned back to look at the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and was turned into a pillar of salt.
“That struck a chord with me,” Magrath says. “You see something and you’re transformed by it. It’s a moment you’ll never forget.”
That was when he decided he would cast his figures in salt. But having made that decision, he found that executing it would not be so easy. In fact, casting a life-sized figure out of salt seemed to be something that had never been done before. So Magrath did some research and discovered a “common binder” that would hold the salt together. (He wouldn’t say what, for proprietary reasons.) Then he modeled the figures in clay and made rubber molds from them. The figures of salt were cast in the molds.
UW students played a part in creating the sculpture. Magrath let all his students (he also teaches at Gage Academy of Art) know that he’d hold a mold making workshop for them in exchange for their volunteer labor, and about five UW students answered the call. In addition, graduate students James Ryan and Andy Fallat fabricated the boxes that the salt figures stand on.
Magrath contacted the city Department of Parks and Recreation to find a pedestrian-friendly home for the sculpture. “I wanted people to just come upon these figures,” he says. “It’s like, in Iraq, you’re walking down the street and until the moment the car bomb goes off, it’s a normal day.”
The department suggested Occidental Park because it had just been renovated, and the Pioneer Square Association became an enthusiastic collaborator. Now, Magrath says, the transient men who tend to hang out in the park have become volunteer docents for the sculpture.
“My friends tell me that if you stop to look at the figures, within minutes one of these men will come up to you and start telling you what they are and what they stand for,” Magrath says.
So far, with the weather remaining dry, the sculpture has stood up pretty well, but Magrath knows it’s just a matter of time before it is destroyed, and he’s OK with that.
“The piece changes over time, and that means people are compelled to visit it again and again, he says. “Instead of being a moment frozen in eternity, the figures are being transformed as we are being transformed. They have a time element that pulls people into the piece. It seems to create empathy.”
For information and additional photos, go to http://lotstribe.typepad.com/lots_tribe/. The clay models from which the Lot’s Tribe figures were cast will be on display at St. Mark’s Cathedral from Oct. 30 until Nov. 30, along with paintings by Ray Gerring, a retired UW art professor.
