Wil Sideman
Long before I ever touched a traditional art medium, I was stacking firewood, shoveling snow, weeding fields and watching thunderstorms from my porch in central Maine. These things along with other farm tasks taught me to work with my hands. However, it was not until late in my adolescence that I made this connection to art or to the art making process. I realized only recently that my choice to pursue art came entirely from the obligation or need to create. I found the processes I work with today through may afternoons on a pottery wheel. The constant motion and ability to manipulate a form through direct contact with my hands was something I found immediately nostalgic. From clay, I soon moved to glass, the intensity of the material attracted me immediately, somewhere between the physical demands, the heat, and, again, this constant motion I was drawn in.
Over the years of experimenting with different methods and materials, I realized, while certain processes may be more appealing to me in nature, it is too limiting to hold myself to a particular one. Processes are girls on a train and I am the eighteen-year-old boy, I fall in love with everyone that passes. My work is a problem solving process; I dwell on thoughts and situations in my daily life, often can find no answer or conclusion. In the studio I am able to obsess over these, pick them apart, look at them from all angles and strive for a resolution.
Recent events have made me look closer at where I came from and how I got to where I am today. This train of thought has brought me to working with materials familiar to me as a child, such as steel and wood. It is the process, far more than the final product, which forces me to continue making work. While being aesthetically inspired by eastern construction I have begun investigating the act of joining materials together. An action I associate still with the wedge. In objects as well as human existence, I find beauty and interest in physical connections. Without physical interaction I see little reward, I want to express this to my audience, show them how it feels to sit down on the porch, your skin still tight from the sunlight and look out at something you created from nothing. I feel exactly this way when I finish a piece; I feel the reward on my cracked hands and in my heavy eyelids.
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Over the years of experimenting with different methods and materials, I realized, while certain processes may be more appealing to me in nature, it is too limiting to hold myself to a particular one. Processes are girls on a train and I am the eighteen-year-old boy, I fall in love with everyone that passes. My work is a problem solving process; I dwell on thoughts and situations in my daily life, often can find no answer or conclusion. In the studio I am able to obsess over these, pick them apart, look at them from all angles and strive for a resolution.
Recent events have made me look closer at where I came from and how I got to where I am today. This train of thought has brought me to working with materials familiar to me as a child, such as steel and wood. It is the process, far more than the final product, which forces me to continue making work. While being aesthetically inspired by eastern construction I have begun investigating the act of joining materials together. An action I associate still with the wedge. In objects as well as human existence, I find beauty and interest in physical connections. Without physical interaction I see little reward, I want to express this to my audience, show them how it feels to sit down on the porch, your skin still tight from the sunlight and look out at something you created from nothing. I feel exactly this way when I finish a piece; I feel the reward on my cracked hands and in my heavy eyelids.
>> COLLECT WIL SIDEMAN
BACK TO THE EXHIBITION DETAILS
Wil received his BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design, and his MFA in 3-D/Glass Studies from the Rochester Institute of Technology. He has studied with glass artists and craftsmen across the Northeast, and has exhibited at the Friends of Glass Chappel Gallery in New York City, the Sculptural Glass Exhibit at Copley Plaza in Boston, MA, and at the 13 Forest Gallery in Arlington, MA.
