Remain at Cobalt Gallery

Cobalt Gallery is a new art gallery in Fort Bragg and I'm showing my sculpture there in July! The gallery is located along the beautiful coast of Mendocino County on the main street of Fort Bragg, NorCal. It's a great space and North Coast Brewing is next door!

July 1-31, 2023

Cobalt Gallery • 430 North Main Street • Fort Bragg, NorCal

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About the Work

The works featured in Remain speak of remembrance, giving form to the idea of memory. Physical things that harken to the totems that wash ashore in our interior landscape like time-tumbled driftwood or bones, stripped of the living layers and relegated to reminders of what once was. After all else is gone, these works remain as markers or guideposts.

The sheer physicality of fabricating this work, the sweaty, active interplay between me and the metal, is important to its formation. The steel underlying these works has been pounded, twisted, bent, smashed, torqued, wrestled, wrenched, hammered, beaten, coaxed, cut, folded, torn, riveted, welded. There is no undoing a smashed metal tube or crumpled sheet metal. The memory of the action is impressed into its physical presence.

The surfaces of most of these works consist of layers of torn paper and wood-glue (a method of papier-mâché), which soften and smooth the form – encasing, blending, and preserving it. There were monotonous days of sitting, applying strips of dipped-in-glue paper one by one. It was with feelings of amazement that I watched the paper skin slowly envelope the raw steel and turn it into something that had never existed before. Then came hours of sanding, coloring, and steel-wooling. I’ve touched every inch of this work multiple times. The surface has been polished smooth and soft through frequent handling, like the effect of time upon memory.

There is grief, and fear, love, frustration and release in this work, and also the joy of creation and of coming to terms with inevitable change. There is a forgivingness here. A letting go and accepting what comes next. Scientific research tells us the human mind softens the past, dulling the sharp edges and painful thorns. The acute immediacy of now has passed, and that has receded into then. 

-Chris Beards July 2023