RICHARD WATTS: "Three Seasons," Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George, B.C., April 11, 2014 to July 13, 2014

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Photo: Ken Turner.

"Shield Kimono Spirit Catching Thunderbird,"

Richard Watts, "Shield Kimono Spirit Catching Thunderbird," 2012, treated rubber tree sap, gauze, forest flora, found objects, paint, rust and miscellaneous particles from source, 18’ x 27’ x 6’.

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Photo: Ken Turner.

"Spirit Geography"

Richard Watts, "Spirit Geography," 2013, treated rubber tree sap, gauze, forest flora, found objects, paint, rust and miscellaneous particles from source, 56” x 81” (each piece).

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Photo: Ken Turner.

"Canoe People"

Richard Watts, "Canoe People," 2008, treated rubber tree sap, gauze, forest flora, found objects, paint, rust and miscellaneous particles from source, 82.5” x 64.5” (right and left) 82.5” x 50.5” (centre).

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Photo: Ken Turner.

"Canoe People" and "Kimono Spirit Catching Thunderbird"

Richard Watts, "Canoe People," 2008, (left), and "Shield Kimono Spirit Catching Thunderbird," 2012, treated rubber tree sap, gauze, forest flora, found objects, paint, rust and miscellaneous particles from source, installation view.

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Photo: Ken Turner.

"Shield Kimono Spirit Catching Thunderbird" and "Spirit Geography"

Richard Watts, "Shield Kimono Spirit Catching Thunderbird," 2012, (left), and "Spirit Geography," 2013, treated rubber tree sap, gauze, forest flora, found objects, paint, rust and miscellaneous particles from source, installation view.

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Richard Watts: Three Seasons

Two Rivers Gallery, Prince George, B.C.

April 11, 2014 to July 13, 2014

By John K. Grande

Richard Watts’ art exists at a strange confluence. The processes he uses break with traditional approaches to sculpture, and yet his art is a call to reconnect to the tactile world, to nature and to an increasingly threatened ecosystem. For years, Watts has worked with this paradigm, drawing on nature as a source, and reinventing the traces of nature and the vestiges of abandoned boats, a metaphor for our great human journey. We sense this ongoing transformation, and something of humanity’s nomadic spirit, in his work.

Watts is as much performance artist as dialectical practitioner of ecological processes. He goes outside to select the elements he will work with, whether in forests, or from an old building or boat. The choice is a necessity for Watts, for our world and what art is, or can be, has changed dramatically. As he says: “I believe, in North America, we are now in a post-historical period.” That post-historical world seeks to remove the traces of context, of accumulated time and history. For him, nature provides continuity, context and a history that parallels our own.

This process relies on intuition, sensing out sources for the art. On the palace grounds at Versailles, Arte Povera artist Giuseppe Penone installed Tra scorza e scorza, a 2008 sculpture composed of two casts from the bark of a large tree that, in effect, reinvent the space of its growth around a younger tree planted within. Similarly, Watts’ process involves layering natural rubber from tree sap (vulcanized latex) up to six times on found forms, whether rock faces, trees, wooden boats, old barns or farmhouse walls.

The real-life scale brings vitality to the resulting relief sculptures, which transform a fragment of the real world for display in the new site of the gallery. Sourcing found materials from the environment like the Italian Arte Povera artists began doing four decades ago with manufactured and natural objects for their installations, involves chance, choice and availability. Watts does the same, sometimes with elements of nature, other times with vestiges of man-made objects and structures, making them powerful agents of a transformative vision. Traces of rock, of tree bark, wood or stone, are activated by light, generating a memory of place and of nature.

These Earth Skins become like stained glass, membranes with a memory. The textures, as in Shield Kimono Spirit Catching Thunderbird, taken from a boat’s surface, tell a tale of time and nature’s life processes – a system we are a part of. Nature, for Watts, then becomes a way of re-establishing a sense of permanence, a history we belong to, and that reaffirms our place in life. The canvas is created in the landscape and the resulting work speaks of continuity, of time’s endless flow.